The Badminton Library
OF
SPORTS AND PASTIMES

EDITED BY
HIS GRACE THE DUKE OF BEAUFORT, K.G.
ASSISTED BY ALFRED E. T. WATSON

BIG GAME SHOOTING
II.

HAND TO HAND WORK

BIG GAME SHOOTING

BY

CLIVE PHILLIPPS-WOLLEY

WITH CONTRIBUTIONS BY

LIEUT.-COLONEL R. HEBER PERCY, ARNOLD PIKE,
MAJOR ALGERNON C. HEBER PERCY, W. A. BAILLIE-GROHMAN,
SIR HENRY POTTINGER, BART., EARL OF KILMOREY, ABEL CHAPMAN,
WALTER J. BUCK, AND ST. GEORGE LITTLEDALE

VOL. II.

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY CHARLES WHYMPER
AND FROM PHOTOGRAPHS

LONDON
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
1894

CONTENTS OF THE SECOND VOLUME

ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE SECOND VOLUME

(Reproduced by Messrs. Walker & Boutall)

FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS

WOODCUTS IN TEXT.

BIG GAME SHOOTING

Among the ice

CHAPTER I
ARCTIC HUNTING

By Arnold Pike

Arctic hunting embraces an enormous field, the extent of which is not yet realised, and I should begin by remarking that my experience, as here set forth, is limited to the seas around Spitzbergen, and that I propose to confine myself to the pursuit of the walrus and the polar bear.

Although the vast herds of walrus which formerly inhabited the Spitzbergen and Novaya Zemlya seas have been sadly thinned by persistent—and often wasteful—hunting, first by the English and Dutch in the early part of the seventeenth century, then by the Russians, and at the present day by the Norwegians, yet enough may still be killed in a season’s hunting to satisfy most sportsmen. The fact that the expeditions after walrus and polar bear which are made to these waters are often partially, or wholly, unsuccessful is due not to the scarcity of game but to the manner in which it is sought. The sportsman usually sails in a yacht—a vessel totally unfit for the work before her—and at Tromsö or Hammerfest picks up an ice pilot, who is also supposed to show where sport is to be obtained, at a season of the year when all the best men are engaged to, or have already sailed with, the professional walrus hunters. The consequences are that the voyage is confined to the open, and therefore easily navigated, waters of the western coast of Spitzbergen, or else that if good hunting grounds are visited much of the game is not seen; for no matter how keen a look-out a man may keep, he is sure to pass over game if he is not used to hunting, and does not know exactly what to look for and where to look for it.

The best way, therefore, in the writer’s opinion, is for the sportsman to hire one of the small vessels engaged in the trade, sailing either from Hammerfest or Tromsö (preferably from the latter port). He could hire a walrus sloop of about forty tons burden for the season, completely fitted out with all the necessary gear and boats, and a crew of nine men (seven before the mast) for about 450l. This amount would cover everything except tinned soups, meat, &c., for his own consumption; and the expenditure is not all dead loss, for if he allows one boat’s crew to regularly hunt seal, whilst he devotes himself principally to bear and walrus, he will probably realise a sum by the sale of skins and blubber, at the conclusion of the voyage, which will meet the greater portion, if not the whole, of the amount paid for the hire of the vessel. There is no difficulty in disposing of the ‘catch.’ If, however, a sportsman decides to go in his own yacht, with an English crew, he should engage during the winter, through the British vice-consul at Tromsö, a good harpooner and three men used to arctic work, and buy a hunting boat (fangstbaad), to the use of which they are accustomed, together with the necessary harpoons, lines, lances, knives, &c.

In either case he should sail from Tromsö early in May if bound for Spitzbergen, where he would in ordinary seasons be able to hunt until the middle of September. In that time, with fair luck, he may expect to kill from five to ten bears, about twenty walrus, thirty reindeer, and from three to four hundred seals. If only small attention is paid to the seals, the number of walrus and bear obtained should be considerably larger.

No especial personal outfit is necessary.

As most of the shooting will be done from a boat that is seldom stationary, the rifle to which the sportsman is most accustomed is the best. A .450 Express, with solid hardened bullet for walrus, and ‘small-holed’ for bear, is a very good weapon. A fowling-piece for geese and a small-bore rifle for practice at seals would also be useful. Whatever weapons are taken, they should be of simple construction and strongly made, for they are liable to receive hard knocks in the rough, wet work incidental to walrus hunting.

As regards clothing, a light-coloured stalking suit (the writer prefers grey), underclothing of the same weight as the sportsman is accustomed to wear during an English winter, and knee-boots, will answer every purpose. For hand covering the mittens (‘vanter’) used by the Norwegian fishermen are most suitable. The sportsman had better lay in his stock of canned provisions and tea in England, but coffee, sugar, &c., can be obtained of good quality and equally cheap at his starting point in Norway.

I. WALRUS (Rosmarus trichechus)

The walrus is one of the largest animals still extant, and although the element of personal danger is not as great in hunting it as in hunting some beasts of lesser bulk, yet the conditions under which the sport is pursued, as well as the nature of the sport itself, are such as will probably tempt one who has once tried this form of sport to return to it.

An average-sized four-year-old bull walrus will measure 10 ft. in length and about the same in girth. The weight is, of course, difficult to determine, but it is probably about 3,000 lbs., of which 350 lbs. may be reckoned as blubber, and 300 lbs. as hide. A large old bull will probably weigh and yield half as much again. The blubber, to be utilised, is mixed with that of the seals which may be obtained, and the oil which is extracted by heat and pressure sold as ‘seal oil’; the hide, which is from 1 in. to 1½ in. in thickness, and makes a soft, spongy leather, is exported principally to Russia and Germany, where it is used for harness, ammunition-boots, &c.

A walrus’ head

The walrus is a carnivorous animal, feeding mostly upon shellfish and worms, and is therefore generally found in the shallow waters along a coastline, diving for its food on banks which lie at a depth of from two to twenty fathoms below the surface. Deeper than that the walrus does not care to go; in fact, it generally feeds in about fifteen fathoms. The tusks are principally used to plough up the bottom in search of food, but are also employed as weapons, and in climbing on to ice. They are composed of hard, white ivory, set for about 6 ins. of their length in a hard bony mass, about 6 ins. in diameter, which forms the front part of the head; the breathing passage runs through this mass, and terminates in two ‘blow-holes’ between the roots of the tusks. The tusk itself is solid, except that portion which is embedded in the bone, and this is filled with a cellular structure containing a whitish oil. Both sexes have tusks, but those of the cow do not run quite so large as those of the bull. The yearling calf has no tusks, but at the end of the second year it has a pair about 2 ins. in length, which grow to about 6 ins. in the third year. The largest pair I have measure 18½ ins. round the curve of the tusk from skull to point, and girth 7½ ins. near the base; but I have seen them much larger, and do not think that anything under 22 ins. can be considered a good head. Cows’ tusks are generally set much closer together than bulls’, and sometimes meet at the points. There are some good specimens illustrating this peculiarity in the Tromsö Museum. The bulls’, on the contrary, generally diverge, and are often upwards of a foot apart at the points. I have read and heard that in rare cases the tusks diverge in curves, but have never seen any. I have one head (I was not in the boat when the walrus was killed) with three tusks, two of which spring apparently from the same socket, and there is no doubt that there are heads with four; but such cases are, of course, very rare. The comparatively small size of the tusks makes the ivory useless for the manufacture of billiard balls and other things of considerable size, and it does not, therefore, command so high a price as elephant ivory, but it is largely used in the manufacture of small articles.

A walrus killed in the water immediately sinks; even if mortally wounded, it will in nine cases out of ten escape, and sink to the bottom. When on the ice, walrus always lie close to the water, and it is therefore necessary to kill them instantly, or they will reach the water and be lost before the boat can arrive within harpooning distance. This can only be done by penetrating the brain, which is no easy matter. The brain lies in what appears to be the neck; that which one would naturally suppose to be the head being nothing but the heavy jaw bones, and mass of bone in which the tusks are set. In reference to this point, I cannot do better than quote Mr. Lamont, who on this and everything else connected with walrus hunting is a most accurate authority. It is with the kind permission of his publishers, Messrs. Chatto and Windus, that I reproduce his plate ‘How to shoot a Walrus.’ In his ‘Yachting in the Arctic Seas,’ page 69, he says:—

No one who has not tried it will readily believe how extremely difficult it is to shoot an old bull walrus clean dead. The front or sides of his head may be knocked all to pieces with bullets, and the animal yet have sufficient strength and sense left to enable him to swim and dive out of reach. If he is lying on his side, with his back turned to his assailant (as in the upper figure), it is easy enough, as the brain is then quite exposed, and the crown of the head is easily penetrated; but one rarely gets the walrus in that position, and when it so happens it is generally better policy to harpoon him without shooting. By firing at an old bull directly facing you, it is almost impossible to kill him, but if half front to you, a shot just above the eye may prove fatal. If sideways, he can only be killed by aiming about six inches behind the eye, and about one-fourth of the apparent depth of his head from the top; but the eye, of course, cannot be seen unless the animal is very close to you, and the difficulty is enormously increased by the back of the head being so imbedded in fat as to appear as if it were part of the neck. This will be understood by a reference to the plate. If you hit him much below that spot, you strike the jaw-joint, which is about the strongest part of the whole cranium. A leaden bullet striking there, or on the front of the head, is flattened like a piece of putty, without doing much injury to the walrus; and even hardened bullets, propelled by six drachms of powder, were sometimes broken into little pieces against the rocky crania of these animals.

Where to shoot a walrus

What becomes of the walrus in the winter it is hard to say, but I have heard them blowing in an open pool of water among the ice on the north coast of Spitzbergen in the month of December. In the spring, however, when the ice begins to break up, they collect in herds on their feeding grounds around the coasts, where they may be found diving for shellfish, or basking and sleeping, singly or in ‘heaps’ of two or three (often five or six) together. They seem to prefer to lie on small cakes of flat bay ice; a single walrus will often take his siesta on a cake only just large enough to float him, and it is among such ice therefore, rather than among rough old pack and glacier blocks, that they should be sought, although I have seen them lying on heavy old water-worn ice, four and five feet above the water. In this case, however, they had no choice. Later in the year, in August and during the autumn, particularly in open years, they collect in some bay (formerly they were found in herds thousands strong), and lie in a lethargic state on the shore. I suppose that this is their breeding season, as the young are cast in April and May, and even in June. In former years, the walrus hunters, if they had experienced a bad season, would hang around the coasts as long as they dared, visiting the various places which were known to be favourite spots for the walrus to ‘go ashore,’ and if they found one occupied, a few hours’ work would compensate them for the bad luck of the whole season.

Massing their forces—if, as customary, several sloops were sailing in company—the hunters attacked the walrus with the lance, and, killing those nearest the water first, formed a rampart behind which the rest of the herd were more or less at their mercy, which quality indeed they did not appear to possess; for, fired by excitement and greed, they would slay and slay, until there were far more of the poor beasts lying dead than they could ever hope to make use of. The remnant of the herd would escape, never to return; they would seek each year some spot further towards the north, and therefore more difficult of access to their enemies. Although, doubtless, the walrus still go ashore late in the autumn, they probably choose some of the islands in the Hinlopen Straits, or the coasts of North East Land and Franz Joseph Land, where the hunters cannot approach them, or would not dare to if they could, at that season of the year; and thus it is rare to hear of a herd being found ashore at the present day. This opportunity of having an inaccessible breeding ground will save the walrus from the fate which has overtaken the American bison, of being almost wiped from the face of the earth; and the species will therefore probably continue to exist in large numbers in the far north, after its scarcity in the more accessible waters has caused the professional walrus hunter to abandon his calling. The most likely localities for walrus around Spitzbergen at present are the coast of North East Land, Cape Leigh Smith (Storö), Rekis-öerne, Hopenöerne on the east coast, and the Hinlopen Straits.

Although the staple food of the walrus consists of mollusca, it also preys, to some extent, upon the seal. I remember that, on opening the stomach of the first walrus I shot, we found it full of long strips of the skin of a seal, apparently Phoca hispida, with the blubber still attached.[1] As the death of this walrus was fairly typical of the manner in which they are now captured, I will try to describe it; but it would be better perhaps to first sketch the boats and implements which are used in walrus hunting.

The boats, called ‘fangstbaade,’ are strongly, yet lightly, built of three-quarter-inch Norwegian ‘furru.’ They are carvel built and bow shaped at both ends; the stem and stern posts are made thick and strong in order to resist the blows of the ice, and the bow sheathed with zinc plates to prevent excessive chafing. They are most commonly 20 ft. or 21 ft. in length, and have their greatest beam, viz. 5 ft., one-third of their length from the bow. It is most important that they should be easy and quick in turning, and this quality is obtained by depressing the keel in the middle. They are painted red inside and white outside, so that they may not be conspicuous amongst ice, but the hunters stultify this idea to some extent by dressing themselves in dark colours. Inside the bow there are small racks guarded by painted canvas flaps, in which the harpoon-heads are fitted, usually three on either side of the boat. The harpoon, the point and edges of which are ground and whetted to a razor-like sharpness, is a simple but very effective weapon. When thrust into a walrus or seal, a large outer barb ‘takes up’ a loop of the tough hide, whilst a small inner fish-hook barb prevents it from becoming disengaged, so that when once properly harpooned, it is very seldom, if ever, that an animal escapes through the harpoon ‘drawing.’ The harpoon-shafts, which lie along the thwarts, are made of white pine poles, 12 ft. in length and from 1 in. to 1½ in. in diameter, tapered at one end to fit the socket of the harpoon-head, in which the shaft is set fast when required by striking its butt against one of the ribs of the boat, or a small block fixed in the after end on the starboard side. The harpoon is used almost entirely as a thrusting weapon, but a good man can set one fast by casting if the occasion demands it, up to a distance of 20 ft. The harpoon line, which is ‘grummeted’ round the shank of the head, consists of sixteen fathoms of two-inch tarred rope, very carefully made of the finest hemp, ‘soft laid’; each line is neatly coiled in a separate box placed beneath the forward thwart. When a walrus is ‘fast,’ it is most important that the line should not slip aft—if allowed to do so it would probably capsize the boat—and to help to prevent this, deep retaining notches are cut in two pieces of hardwood fixed one on each side of the stempost, the top of which is also channelled.

The lance also lies along the thwarts, its broad blade contained in a box fixed at the starboard end of the forward thwart. The head weighs about 3½ lbs., and the white pine shafts 5 lbs. to 7 lbs., according to length. It is generally about 6 ft. and tapered from 2½ ins. at the socket to 1½ in. at the handle. The head is riveted to the shaft; two projecting ears run some way up, and are bound to it by a piece of stout hoop iron, for additional security.

Along the thwarts also lie a mast and sail, and several ‘hakkepiks,’ a form of boathook, most useful for ice work. Another box, fastened to the starboard gunwale, holds a telescope. In the bottom of the boat are twenty-four fathoms of rope, two double-purchase blocks, and an ice anchor; in addition to its ordinary use, this anchor is employed as a fulcrum by which, with the aid of the blocks and rope, a boat’s crew can haul a dead walrus out of the water on to a suitable piece of ice, to be flensed.

The fore and after peaks are provided with lockers, which should contain a hammer, pair of pliers, nails, and some sheet lead—for patching holes which a walrus may make with his tusks—matches, spare grummets, cartridges, &c., and a small kettle—a small spirit lamp would also be useful—together with coffee and hard bread sufficient for two or three days. An axe and one or two rifles, which lean against the edge of the forward locker, in notches cut to take the barrels, skinning knives, a whetstone, and a compass, which should be in a box fitted under the after thwart, and one or two spare oars complete the list of articles, without which a ‘fangstbaad’ should never touch the water. Nevertheless, it is usual to find that two most important items, viz. food and a compass, are missing. This is surprising, for in this region of ice and fog no one knows better than the walrus hunter when he quits his vessel’s side how uncertain is the length of time which must elapse before he can climb on board again, even though he may merely, as he thinks, be going to ‘pick up’ a seal, lying on an ice cake a few hundred yards away.

A boat’s crew consists of four or five men, and the quickness with which they can turn their boat is greatly accelerated by their method of rowing and steering. Each man rows with a pair of oars, which he can handle much better than one long one when amongst ice. The oars are hung in grummets to stout single thole-pins, so that when dropped they swing alongside, out of the way, yet ready for instant action. The steersman, called the ‘hammelmand,’ sits facing the bow, and guides the boat by rowing with a pair of short oars. I think this is preferable to steering either with a rudder or with a single long oar, as the whalers do, as it not only enables a crew to turn their boat almost on her own centre, but economises nearly the whole strength of one man. As there are six thwarts in the boat the ‘hammelmand’ can, if necessary, instantly change his position, and row like the others.

The harpooner, who commands the boat’s crew, rows from the bow thwart, near the weapons and telescope, which he alone uses. It is he who searches for game, and decides on the method of attack when it is found. ‘No. 2,’ generally the strongest man in the boat, is called the ‘line man’; it is his duty to tend the line when a walrus is struck and to assist the harpooner, while ‘stroke’ and the ‘hammelmand’ hang back on their oars, to prevent the boat from ‘overrunning’ the walrus.

In such a boat, then, one lovely September morning, we are rowing easily back to the sloop, which is lying off Bird Bay, a small indentation in the east face of the northernmost point of Spitzbergen. The skin of an old he-bear, half covering the bottom of the boat, proves that we have already earned our breakfasts, but no one is in a hurry. The burnished surface of the sea is unmarked by a ripple save where broken by the lazy dip of the oars. Northwards, beyond the bold contour of North Cape, the rugged outlines of the Seven Islands stand out sharply against the blue sky; behind us the hills of the mainland, dazzling in their covering of new snow, stretch away to the south. Bird Bay and Lady Franklin’s Bay are full of fast ice, which must have lain there all the summer, but the blazing sun makes it difficult to see where ice ends and water begins. Around us and to the east the sea is fairly open, except for the flat cakes of ice broken off from the fast ice, and several old sea-worn lumps, which, from their delicate blue colour (sea ice is white), we know have fallen from the glaciers of the east coast, or, perhaps, have travelled from some land, out there beyond Seven Islands, which no man has yet seen. The harpooner is balancing himself, one foot on the forward locker and one on the thwart, examining through a telescope something which appears to be a lump of dirty ice, about half a mile away. Suddenly he closes his glass and seizes the oars. ‘Hvalros,’ he says, and without another word the ‘hammelmand’ heads the boat for the black mass which, as we rapidly approach (for no one is lazily inclined now), the mirage magnifies into the size of a small house. Now we are within a couple of hundred yards, and each man crouches in the bottom of the boat, the harpooner still in the bow, his eyes level with the combing, intently fixed upon the walrus. The ‘hammelmand’ alone is partly erect on his seat, only his arms moving, as he guides us from behind one lump to another. Suddenly the walrus raises his head, and we are motionless. It is intensely still, and the scraping of a piece of ice along the boat seems like the roar of a railway train passing overhead on some bridge. Down goes the head, and we glide forward again. The walrus is uneasy; again and again he raises his head and looks around with a quick motion, but we have the sun right at our back and he never notices us. At last we are within a few feet, and with a shout of ‘Vœk op, gamling!’ (‘Wake up, old boy!’), which breaks the stillness like a shot, the harpooner is on his feet, his weapon clasped in both hands above his head. As the walrus plunges into the sea, the iron is buried in his side, and with a quick twist to prevent the head from slipping out of the same slit that it has cut in the thick hide, the handle is withdrawn and thrown into the boat. No. 2, who, with a turn round the forward thwart, has been paying out the line, now checks it, as stroke and the ‘hammelmand,’ facing forward, hang back on their oars to check the rush. Bumping and scraping amongst the ice, we are towed along for about five minutes, and then stop as the walrus comes to the surface to breathe. In the old days the lance would finish the business, but now it is the rifle. He is facing the boat, I sight for one of his eyes, and let him have both barrels, without much effect apparently, for away we rush for two or three minutes more, when he is up again, still facing the boat. He seems to care no more for the solid Express bullets (I am using a .450 Holland & Holland Express) than if they were peas; but he is slow this time, and, as he turns to dive, exposes the fatal spot at the back of the head, and dies.

It does not take us long to fix the ice anchor in a suitable cake, and with the blocks and rope we drag him head-first on to the ice, and skin him. On examining his head, I find that the whole of the front part has been broken into small pieces by the first four shots, one tusk blown clean away, and the other broken. So much for shooting a walrus in the face!

Of course, the walrus does not always allow the boat to approach within harpooning distance. If it is very uneasy (which it is more likely to be in calm weather than when there is a slight breeze blowing), the beast will begin to move when the boat is, say, fifty yards distant. Then is the time for a steady wrist and a clear eye, for the creature must be shot, and shot dead, or, no matter how badly it is wounded, it will reach the water, and, dying there, sink like a stone to the bottom.

Although the walrus does not often show fight, it is not, on the whole, a rare thing for him to do so. The harpooners say that three-year-old bulls are the most liable to attack a boat, especially if it is allowed to overrun them when fast to a harpoon line. The following incident illustrates this.

One sunny night, towards the end of May, we were running for Black Point, Spitzbergen, as the skipper did not like the look of a heavy black bank of clouds which a freshening breeze was blowing up out of the south-west. Suddenly, as we were threading our way through some heavy old ice, we found that we were among the walrus, and we determined to lie aback for a few hours and take some. They were lying about in twos and threes on the ice lumps, and in a good mood to be stalked, so that we soon had the skins of three young bulls in the bottom of the boat; but the fourth, a three-year-old bull, gave trouble. He did not like the look of the boat, and a rather long shot only wounded him. After diving off the ice he rose quite close to the boat, and when the harpooner gave him the weapon, instead of making off he immediately charged. It was hand-to-hand work then: lance and axe, hakkepik and oar, thrust and slashed, struck and shoved, while the white tusks gleamed again and again through the upper streaks of the boat; for a walrus can strike downwards, upwards, and sideways, with much greater quickness than one would imagine possible. After a while he drew off, and, slipping a cartridge into the Express (which I had emptied as soon as the struggle began), I put a bullet through his brain, and he hung dead on the line. We were lucky to escape with no more damage than a few holes in the boat and a couple of broken oars. There were many walrus around us, both on the ice and in the water, but the breeze had freshened into a gale, and snow began to fall heavily, so that we were glad to get on board again and run for shelter into Kraus Haven, a little inlet in the mossy plain which stretches from the foot of Black Point to the sea.

Few men are likely ever to forget the first occasion on which they found themselves amongst a herd of walrus in the water. Scores of fierce-looking heads—for the long tusks, small bloodshot eyes, and moustache on the upper lip (every bristle of which is as thick as a crow quill) give the walrus an expression of ferocity—gaze, perhaps in unbroken silence, from all sides upon the boat. See! the sun glints along a hundred wet backs, and they are gone. Away you row at racing speed to where experience tells you they will rise again. ‘Here they are! Take that old one with the long tusks first!’ A couple of quick thrusts, right and left, and away you go again, fast to two old bulls that will want a lot of attention before you can cut their tusks out. Indeed, unless one has served his apprenticeship, he had better not meddle with the harpoon at all. The old skippers and harpooners can spin many a yarn of lost crews and boats gone under the ice through a fatal moment’s delay in cutting free from the diving walrus.

II. THE POLAR BEAR (Ursus maritimus)

As a ‘sporting’ animal the polar bear is, to the writer’s mind, somewhat overrated; the walrus affording more exciting, and in every sense better, sport than does the bear.

DEATH OF A POLAR BEAR

Although the history of Arctic exploration and adventure contains accounts of many a death laid to its charge, yet the ‘polar’ makes but a poor fight against the accurately sighted breechloaders of to-day, and it is very rarely that one hears of the loss of a man in an actual encounter with a bear. And this for several reasons. Unlike the grizzly, the polar has generally to fight his man at a disadvantage. Seen first at a long distance, he commonly requires but little stalking. A boat full of men creeps along the ice edge until within shooting distance, and if when merely wounded the bear has the pluck to charge, he has not the opportunity, for his enemies are on the water, and once he leaves the ice he is completely at their mercy—no match for a man who can handle even a lance or an axe moderately well. Should a man happen to encounter a polar on land or ice, however, the brute’s great size and marvellous vitality naturally make him a somewhat formidable foe, especially as the soles of his feet are covered with close-set hairs, which enable him to go on slippery ice as securely as upon terra firma. This characteristic of having the sole of the foot covered with hair is peculiar to Ursus maritimus. But even when encountered on ice, nine bears out of ten will not fight, even when they have the chance, unless badly ‘cornered.’ As a rule, Ursus maritimus is purely carnivorous, preying mostly on seals, which bask on the ice with their heads always very close to, if not actually over, the water, a habit of which the bear takes advantage in approaching to within striking distance, by dropping into the water some way to leeward and swimming noiselessly along the ice edge. Even if the seal perceives the white head, the only visible portion of the swimming bear, it probably takes it for a drifting splinter of ice, and pays no more attention to it, until a blow from the heavy forepaw of the bear ends sleep and life together. I am told that the bear manages to secure seals lying at their holes on large flat expanses of ‘fast’ or bay ice, but imagine that such cases are rare, as anyone who has tried to stalk a seal basking at its hole knows how extremely difficult, if not impossible, it is to approach within rifle-shot of it. I once, however, killed a large blue seal at the fast ice edge, along whose back, from ‘stem to stern,’ were five parallel gashes, freshly cut through hide and blubber, marking the passage of Bruin’s paw as the seal had slipped beneath it into the water. The walrus is also attacked, of course on the ice only; for in the water both walrus and seal can sport around their enemy with impunity; indeed, if the professional hunters are to be believed, the former sometimes turns the tables, and under these circumstances it is often the bear which comes off second best in the encounter.

Although carnivorous, the polar also appears to be able to exist on a vegetable diet, like other bears. Nordenskjöld observed one browsing on grass on the northern coast of Siberia (he remarks that it was probably an old bear whose tusks were much worn), and it is on record (‘Encyclopædia Britannica,’ ninth edition) that one was fed on bread only for some years. From its manner of life this bear is naturally almost amphibious, ‘taking’ the water as a matter of course, and, no doubt, frequently making long journeys by sea to regain its habitat, from which it has been carried on some drifting ice-lump. Captain Sabine found one ‘swimming powerfully, forty miles from the nearest shore, and with no ice in sight to afford it rest.’ No beast on the earth leads a harder life than the polar bear. Relying solely on the chase for its support, it roams continually amongst the ice. Even during the winter it does not retire from the battle of life, like its less hardy congeners, but wanders on through the storm and lasting darkness, for this species does not as a rule hibernate. It is alleged elsewhere that the female differs in this respect from the male, hibernating whilst he remains out, and the fact that all the bears (between sixty and seventy) killed in the winter months during the Austrian expedition under MM. Weyprecht and Payer were males, supports this statement; but, on the other hand, the only bears, two in number, which we killed in midwinter (on December 11 and 19, 1888), while wintering on Danes Island (north coast of Spitzbergen), were both females, accompanied on each occasion by a cub. I think it possible, therefore, that it is only the females which are about to cast their young in the spring that lie dormant during the winter. Why the rest are roaming in the darkness, or what they find to eat in that land of death, I cannot tell; for the seals do not lie on the ice in the dark time (at that season of the year we could not distinguish day from night), and, as has been said, the bear is no match for the seal in the water.

Even if the records of gigantic grizzlies—brutes weighing 2,000 lbs. and upwards—are trustworthy, the polar must yet be allowed to be, upon the average, the largest of his tribe. Most Londoners know the old beast in the Zoological Gardens in Regent’s Park (presented by Mr. Leigh Smith), which is a good type of a big male; and it is not too much to say that a large full-grown male bear of this species will measure from 8 ft. to 8 ft. 6 ins. from snout to tail, and weigh, probably, 1,500 lbs. The largest I have myself killed measured 8 ft. (Norwegian measurement) in length in the flesh, but I have seen a skin, now in the possession of Mrs. Dunsmuir, of Victoria, British Columbia, which measures 9 ft. 10 in. from the snout to root of tail. This must have belonged to an enormous bear.

The reasons why some of the expeditions after polar bear are unsuccessful have already been referred to. If the bears are sought for in the proper places, there is no reason why they may not be found and killed. Around Spitzbergen the most ‘likely’ places are in Stor Fjord, along the south-east and east coast (which indeed is but seldom accessible), and on the north coast east of Wiide Bay, and in the Hinlopen Straits; the number of bear to be found in these localities depending, of course, on the state of the ice. In the spring of 1889, the south-east coast was more or less open, and the bears were so numerous that the skipper of one of a fleet of seven walrus sloops, which arrived from Norway during the last week in May, told me that he had counted upwards of twenty bears on the ice at one time, near Half-moon Island. In the same spring, one sloop killed or captured fifty bears in the locality. When a bear is discovered on the ice by the look-out in the crow’s-nest, a ‘fangstbaad’ is lowered, and the hunt begins. It is often but a tame affair. If one of the hunters can manage to show himself between the main body of the ice or land and his quarry, the bear will generally take to the water, when he may be pursued and dispatched at leisure, for he is not a fast swimmer, although a powerful one. The carcase of a bear, unlike that of the walrus or seal, always floats. Among rough old pack or on ‘hummocky’ fast ice, however, the affair assumes a more sporting turn, as the bear must then be carefully stalked amid the ice lumps, either by boat or on foot, great attention being paid to the direction of the wind; for Ursus maritimus is one of the keenest-scented animals in creation, and if he once winds the hunter, the chase may be abandoned unless there is a chance of driving him into the water. The chief danger of such a hunt is from the ice, which is liable to be ‘working,’ or which, in the case of bay ice, may be rotten in places at the season of the year when most of the hunting is done. In many cases a man should not venture on a floe or big sheet of bay ice to chase or intercept a bear without a pair of Norwegian snow-shoes and a ‘hakkepik,’ and should be careful also in stepping on to the ice from a boat, as the edge is often undermined by the action of the water, and will break beneath his weight, although to the eye it looks as solid as the rest of the block.

There is another phase of hunting. When the darkness of an Arctic winter has settled down on the ice fields, wrapping some ice-bound crew in its pall, then one of the few excitements which is granted to these men, left out of the light and warmth of the world, is the silent coming of some old white bear.

Early one December morning, when wintering on Danes Island, we heard bears about a mile away among the loose ice near Amsterdam Island. The men judged that the cries were made by a cub which was being punished by its mother for not being able to keep up with her, and this proved to be the case; for before noon an old she-bear, and what seemed to be, from the tracks we afterwards saw, a three-parts-grown cub, were ‘nosing’ about some old seal carcases which, frozen into stony hardness, were lying a few yards distant from the snow wall surrounding the house. I crept up to them, but with an overcast sky and no moon there was not light enough for a fair aim, even at a few feet distance, so that the heavy balls from the Paradox gun struck her too far back to stop her at once, and with a low roar both she and the cub made off.

For some way along the shore there was an open space, a few feet in width, between the ice and rocks, caused by the rise and fall of the tides, and we saw the phosphorescent light flash up as the old bear struck the water in crossing it. The cub kept along the shore-line, and the skipper and myself followed his trail in deep snow until it ran on to the ice. As we retraced our steps we saw a spurt of flame apparently about a quarter of a mile away, near the Corpse Rocks; but the report of the rifle never reached us, being lost in the rending and groaning of the ice, which was grinding its way out of the Gat. This shot we found was fired by the mate, who was out on the ice after the old bear, with whom he had evidently come up, for we saw his rifle flash again and again, and had just decided to go to him, dragging our smallest boat with us, when the ice must have become jammed in the mouth of the Gat, for it began to close again. We were soon up with him, and did not stop to skin the bear, but dragged it head first over the ice to the house. The mate had found her lying down, and in twelve shots, two of which were miss-fires, had in the darkness put six bullets into her, the last of which had pierced her heart. She was in fair condition, although giving suck, but the stomach was quite empty, save for an old reindeer moccasin which one of the men had thrown away. One of my shots had almost filled the abdominal cavity with torn entrails and débris, but, with this terrible wound and a broken hind leg, the bear had fought her way for more than a quarter of a mile through loose ice, before lying down on the spot where the mate found her. A few hours later a south-west gale was cutting the crest off the heavy seas which were rolling where the trail we made in dragging the dead bear had been.

THE CORPSE ROCKS

In conclusion, I may mention a ruse we employed during the winter months to attract any bears which might be roaming in our vicinity. A small quantity of seal blubber was kept burning and simmering in an iron pot, placed without our snow wall and replenished every few hours. Towards the end of February, two days after the reappearance of the sun, a large old he-bear wandered about within sight, for the greater portion of two days, apparently sniffing up the fumes from our blubber pot, without daring to approach within four hundred yards of the house. At length we killed him, and after taking the skin decided to utilise the flesh, to the sparing of our blubber stock. With this idea, we filled the cavity of his chest with shavings and coal oil, and set the mass on fire. The odour of the dense black vapour which poured from the carcase may have attractions for bears, but was too pungent and powerful for human nostrils. The men were quickly of the opinion that ‘bear would not eat bear,’ and the following morning we were compelled to cut a hole in the ice, and commit the charred body of the last of our winter visitors to a watery grave.

CHAPTER II
THE CAUCASUS

By Clive Phillipps-Wolley

I. INTRODUCTORY

Although the Caucasus is within a week’s journey of Charing Cross, to the average Englishman it is as little known as Alaska. As a hunting ground for big game it is infinitely less known than Central Africa. The men who have shot in Africa and written of their sport in that country may be counted by the score; but, as far as I know, up to the present moment no book has been written (except my own)[2] upon the sport of the Caucasus, and in this chapter I am obliged to rely upon my own experience and some rough notes sent me by Mr. St. George Littledale. That being so, it may well be that much has been omitted which may hereafter become common knowledge; I can only affirm that the statements made are trustworthy, as being the outcome of actual personal experience, unvarnished and undiluted.

To me the Caucasus is an enchanted land. The spell of its flower-clad steppes, of its dense dreamy forests, of its giant wall of snow peaks, fell upon me whilst I was still a boy, and will be with me all my life through. It was the first country in which I ever hunted, and it may be that I am prejudiced in its favour on that account, or it may be that I am right, that there is no country under heaven so beautiful and none in which the witchery of sport is so strong. Let my confession of prejudice be taken into consideration by all who read this chapter, and with it the verdict of my quondam companion in Svânetia: ‘The Caucasus is an accursed country to hunt in, a country of ceaseless climbing and chronic starvation, in which the sport is not nearly worth the candle.’ This was the honest conviction of one who is no mean sportsman, and who since his Caucasian experiences has done exceptionally well in India.

But men define sport differently. To those whose ambition it is to kill really wild game in a wild and savage country in which they will get but little help from any but their own right hands, to them I say, try the high solitudes round Elbruz and the ironstone ridges of Svânetia.

The best time for sport in the mountains is the end of June, July, August, and the first week in September, after which another month may be spent profitably hunting bear and boar in the chestnut forests on the Black Sea; for aurochs the hunter should be in the sylvan labyrinths at the head of the Kuban in August.

Taking London as your point of departure, you can reach the Caucasus by four different routes: either by Paris, Marseilles, and thence by one of the boats of the Messageries Maritimes (running once a fortnight) viâ Constantinople to Batoum; or by Calais, Cologne, Vienna and Odessa, to Batoum; or by the Oriental Express viâ Paris and Constantinople; or by Wilson’s line of boats from Hull to St. Petersburg, and thence by rail viâ Moscow and Voroneze to Vladikavkaz.

The first route takes about eleven days, and costs about 16l. 16s.; the second takes (roughly) nine days, and costs about 20l. The third route is, I believe, the quickest and most expensive, but I have not tried it.

My own favourite route is the fourth, by adopting which you gain the advantage of a quiet and untroubled journey, with few vexatious changes, only one custom-house (and that with a consul-general at hand to help you through), and the possibility of alighting from the train within a drive of the outskirts of your hunting ground. The cost of the journey from London to Vladikavkaz by this route is about (including food, &c.) 20l., or as much more as you like to make it. From St. Petersburg to the Don the level lands of Russia glide by your carriage window unbroken by a single hill—I had almost said by a single tree. After Voroneze you enter the steppe country proper, a sea of flowers in spring, a perfect hell of dust, or mud, or wind, for all the rest of the year. From Voroneze these steppes roll right up to the foot of the main chain of the Caucasus, and standing on the plains near Naltchik you may see at a coup d’œil some hundreds of versts of snow-capped mountains rising like a sheer wall drawn from the north-east to the south-west of the peninsula. These snow-capped mountains and the ‘black hills’ (as the natives call the densely wooded foot-hills) constitute the principal game preserve of the country, and resemble, in their appearance and in the varieties of game with which they abound, the hill country of India, to such an extent that an old friend of mine, whose happiest days had been spent in shikar in the Himalayas, used to allege that all the game beasts found in the Caucasus were mere varieties of the Indian fauna.

Before dealing with the different districts and the game found in each, a few general hints to the traveller may not come amiss.

The Caucasus is the arena of the hardest fight Russia ever fought, and, having partially depopulated the country, she still holds it by force of arms. That being so, the more unpretentious a traveller is, the better is his chance of passing unquestioned about the country. Strong introductions from home and from the Foreign Office are more likely to hamper than to help, and if you want leave to go to any little travelled district, the best way is to take it. If you ask for it you are likely to be refused, but if you go in quietly, with a small outfit, and devote yourself exclusively to hunting, no one is likely to interfere with you.

The best outfit in the Caucasus is that which comes nearest to the hunter’s beau idéal, i.e. as much as he can carry himself. This of course, like all ideals, is unattainable, but you may come very close to it; and as there are many places in which, when in pursuit of mountain game, you cannot use horses, your baggage must be such as one, or at most two, men can pack in a bad place. Now a man should pack 50 lbs., and if your means are unlimited, your baggage need only be limited by the number of men you can persuade to accompany you; but the more men you have with you the less work you will get done per man, as the chief luxury of the Caucasian is gossip, and with a crowd of followers the temptation to loaf and talk would prove irresistible.

Two men, one as a guide and gillie, and one to leave in camp (both of them taking their share of packing whenever camp is moved), should be sufficient for anyone. Of course, where it is practicable, ponies should be used, as with them a greater weight can be packed, and packed too more expeditiously, than with men; and in most cases it will be found easy enough to take pack ponies to establish your main camp, proceeding from that on foot for short expeditions of three or four days. It is as well to remember that 200 lbs. is a good load for a pony in rough country, more, probably, than he could carry on most of the Caucasian trails, and from 50 lbs. to 60 lbs. quite enough for a man, although I have known one of my own men carry nearly double that weight during an ordinary day’s tramp, arriving at camp towards sundown brimful of spirits and devilment. I remember that when his load was off he stood on his head, and ‘larked’ about with the other fellows to relieve his exuberance of vitality. A tente d’abri, to weigh about 15 lbs., is the best tent for Caucasian travel, because it is the lightest and handiest to carry. My old tent used to weigh about 20 lbs., and this with an express rifle (about 10 lbs.), cartridges, field glasses, a revolver and a few sundries, used to constitute my own ‘pack.’[3]

When travelling with Caucasian porters and hunters it is as well to treat them as comrades and not as servants. Although they work for hire, they do not understand the relation of master and servant, and, though perfectly ready to help you when you need help, expect you to help yourself when you can, whilst in all matters of food and camp comfort they expect to share and share alike with the head of the expedition. May I digress here for a moment to say that this is one of the most important secrets of travel? Never allow yourself any luxuries in a ‘tight place’ which your men have no share in. If you have only one pipeful of tobacco, when provisions are short, share it with your men, and in the Caucasus at any rate you will not lose your reward. It is a good many years ago now, but the memory of one chilly night among the mountains is with me still, when I woke at 3 a.m. to find myself warm and snug under two extra bourkas (native blankets). The owners of the blankets were squatting on their hams, almost in the fire, and talking to pass the long cold hours until dawn. Having rated them for their folly and made them take back their blankets and turn in, I rolled over and slept again. When I next woke—it was 7 a.m. (shamefully late for camp)—the men were still crouching over the embers, helping to cook breakfast, their bourkas having been replaced upon my shoulders. I had paid those men off the day before this happened, and they left me next morning with a hearty ‘God be with you,’ utterly unconscious that they had done anything more than the proper thing towards their employer and companion who, ‘poor devil, could not sleep unless he was warm, and became ill if he did not get a meal every day in the week.’

A sleeping bag such as Alpine Club men use would be an excellent substitute for blankets, and with that, a pipeful of tobacco, a little bread and bacon and a small flask of whiskey, any reasonably keen and hearty sportsman should be able to hold out for a few nights among the mountain-tops in August. Indeed, if this is too much hardship for the would-be ibex hunter, he had better give up ibex hunting.

In all the best districts for mountain game round Elbruz the traveller will find smoke-blackened lairs amongst the rocks, and round beds amongst the fallen pine needles at the base of some great tree just on the timber limit. In these, for generations, the ibex hunters of Svânetia have rested from their labours and waited for the dawn.

Waiting for the dawn

As to general camp outfit, any light outfit for a hunter’s camp in a temperate region (e.g. Europe or North America) will suffice; extreme portability being the principal thing to aim at, as the trails are infamously bad in the best game districts.

Eschewing luxuries, let the hunter take with him all the flour he can carry, as round Elbruz and in all the best mountain districts the only flour obtainable is of villainous quality, and the bread made from it will damage the most cast-iron digestion.

As to foot-gear, English hobnailed boots may do excellently well for mountaineers, and may be the best possible things on ice. I would as soon wear rings on my fingers and bells on my toes as attempt to hunt in boots. For still hunting of any kind, whether in the mountains or in the forest, moccasins of some sort are essential, whether they be soled with india-rubber like tennis shoes, or simply soled with a double sole of deer’s hide, like those used in North America. For the ‘tender foot’ old tennis shoes are excellent things, but a pair per diem would not be too much to allow for ibex shooting in the Caucasus, the rocks cutting any foot-gear to pieces in the shortest possible time.

The native moccasin is the best after all; a sock of deer skin or some other soft tanned hide, made large and loose, with a split down the middle of the sole from toe to heel, which is laced up with raw hide laces, the laces running across and across each other thus ××××. The moccasin is stuffed with fine mountain grass, and is then put on damp and tightly laced. By these means a comfortable fit is ensured, the tender hollow beneath the instep is protected from sharp rocks, and a firm grip in slippery places is given by the kind of network made by the laces. In boots a man has no chance of using his toes to cling with; even to bend his foot is beyond his powers, and a boot once worn out cannot be repaired in camp, whereas a moccasin may be patched until none of the original article remains.

A sling for your rifle is a necessity in all mountain shooting; so, too, is an alpenstock, which should never be shod with metal, the ring of which against the rocks would proclaim your approach half a mile away. Choose a good stout pole of some hard wood for yourself; harden it (and especially the point) in the fire, and test it carefully before using it, as it may have to carry your weight in awkward places.

Wages in the Caucasus vary according to the amount of travel in the district. If the sportsman is unfortunate enough to run across a district in which foreign tourists are common, the charges made for men and horses will be excessive, but in remote districts, off the main lines of travel, you could (in 1888) hire a man and his horse for 5s. a day, and a porter to carry your food and blankets in the mountains at 1s. a day.

In 1882 I travelled and shot for three months in the Caucasus with a friend. During the whole of that period I carried the money-bags, and at the end of the trip, I believe that I was able to return a little small change to my companion out of the 100l. with which he had entrusted me, as his share of our joint purse. Out of our 200l.. I paid railway fares, hotel bills, and all camp expenses; and it is only fair to add that when in a town the best room in the best hotel, and its best bottle of wine, was only just good enough for us. Luckily, we spent very little time in towns.

Those days, I am afraid, have already passed away, but two roubles a day should still be ample pay for any of the men who accompany a shooting party, and less than that would probably be taken gratefully. The chief difficulty of the Caucasus as a shooting ground for Englishmen lies in the language of the country, which varies in every district. Either Russian or Georgian would probably be sufficient to carry a man through the whole country between the Black Sea and the Caspian, as he would generally find some one who spoke one or other of these tongues in every village he entered, and even if now and again he came to a hamlet where no one could understand his speech, the ordinary Caucasian is wonderfully apt at the language of signs.

An interpreter can be hired at Tiflis or Kutais, but he will be more trouble than a valet and more fastidious, besides doubling the expense of the expedition and causing constant trouble with your men. There may, of course, be good interpreters; if so, I have been unfortunate in never meeting any. My last word of advice shall be, try to do without them, pick up a little Russian for yourself, and then trust to luck and good temper to pull you through.[4]

II. NORTH-WEST CAUCASUS.

The Caucasus includes not only the great range which gives its name to the isthmus, but also a district as large as France, bounded on the north by Russia, on the east by the Caspian, on the south by Armenia and Persia, and on the west by the Black Sea and the Azov.

In any similar area you would expect to find districts varying considerably in their fauna, but in the Caucasus the districts to the north and south of the chain vary to such an extent, that the naturalist Eichwald speaks of the ‘tall peaks of Caucasus,’ as putting the most distinct limits to the fauna of Asia and Europe.

The northern side of the chain, from what is called the Manitch depression to the foot-hills of the main chain, is simply a continuation of the steppes of Russia, a land without trees, and, until you get near the foot-hills, devoid of all game except feathered game and wolves.

To the north-west of the mountains, the great game district is that which lies along the banks of the Kuban, a river rising in the main chain near Elbruz, and flowing thence due north for a space, after which it turns sharply westward, and flows parallel to the main chain, finally emptying itself into the Black Sea. On its road from Elbruz to the sea it receives the waters of every stream which drains to the north-west of the chain; and it is here, between the Kuban and the mountains, and upon the banks and head waters of the Kuban’s tributaries, that the hunting grounds of Northern Caucasus are to be found.

Going east from Taman along the line of the Kuban, the country is broken up by huge beds of a tall reed called kamish by the natives (Arundo phragmites of the naturalists), which grows to such a height as to hide a man riding through it. In places these reed beds stretch for miles, and through them the Kuban runs, a dull sluggish flood, more like a great canal than a mountain-born river.

Its banks of black mud, however, are interesting enough to the sportsman, written over as they are with the ‘sign’ of the beasts which find safe harbour in the adjoining jungles.

Of these beasts the commonest is the wild boar, an animal which I believe grows to larger proportions, and exists in greater numbers, in the Caucasus than anywhere else on earth. A pair of tusks, the tracings of which are before me now (the originals being in the possession of Colonel Veerubof, Governor of Naltchik), measure round the outside edge 11½ ins. and 11¼ ins. respectively.

Like the European wild boar, the Caucasian beast is of a blackish-grey colour, covered with a long coat of stiff bristles, which he erects along his spine when irritated, making him appear some inches taller than he really is. Professor Radde, of the Tiflis Museum, has been kind enough to supply me with the following particulars. ‘The largest solitary boars,’ he says, ‘measured at the shoulder and measured straight, stand about 105 centimeters, and their total weight not dressed rarely exceeds 15 puds (600 lbs.).’ These are undoubtedly big beasts, but in the chestnut forests of Circassia, and in the reed beds of the Kuban, there are such rich feeding grounds that in them even a 600-lb. boar seems possible. In India, I suppose, to shoot a boar is as vile a crime as vulpecide in Leicestershire, but, except on the plains of Kabardah, there is no place in the Caucasus where the boar could be hunted on horseback, and even there the hunting would be but a very short scurry at early dawn from the maize fields to the foot-hills, the shelter of which once gained, the quarry would be absolutely safe from any mounted enemy.

Enormous as their numbers are, wild boars would be even more numerous between the Black Sea and the Caspian, were it not for their nocturnal raids on the maize fields of the natives, most of whom, being Mahommedans, only hunt the marauders in self-defence, not deigning to so much as touch them when dead. The Cossacks, of course, have no such scruples about pork, and the principal object left in life to the old scouts (‘plastouns’), who were wont to keep the Kuban red with Tcherkess blood, is the pursuit of the boar.

In the great reed beds in which they used to lurk waiting until the men of some native ‘aoul’ went out to harvest, that they might give the village to sword and flame, these same scouts wander to-day, grey as the boars they hunt, rough, savage, and uncouth as their quarry, wounded probably in a score of places, but silent-footed, enduring, and as well acquainted with every game path in the reeds as the very beasts which made them. These are the men to obtain for guides if you can get them, but beware of paying them a single kopeck as long as there is a cabak (whisky shop) within a day’s march of you. As a rule the plastoun shoots his game at night, waiting by some wallow or by the side of some swine path leading to water or fruit trees, until he hears a rustling among the reeds, sounding strangely loud in the moonlit August night, and growing nearer and nearer until between the watcher and the skyline comes a great dark bulk. Round the muzzle of his old musket the plastoun ties a white string with a large knot in it, where the foresight should be, and aiming low into the middle of the dark mass, pulls his trigger when the boar is almost on the muzzle of his rifle. My first experience of boar shooting was connected with such a shot as this; but on that occasion the victory rested with the boar. Through a long summer night I waited for my gillie to come back from his vigil by the Kuban, and at dawn he came, four men carrying him. He had wounded the old grey beast on a narrow path through the kamish, and had lain still while the boar gnashed his teeth and glared about for his foe. But the tall reeds hid the hunter, and the boar turning retraced his steps, leaving a broad blood trail as he went. Until the grey dawn the Tcherkess waited, and then, confident that he would find his enemy cold and stiff not far away, he got up and followed the tracks. Before he had gone far, there was a crash among the reeds behind him, followed by a fierce rush along the trail, and as he turned to face his foe, the keen white tusks ripped him from knee to thigh-joint and across and across his stomach, until his bowels rushed out and he lay across the pathway nearer death than the boar.

The boar’s charge

When his companions found him he had still life enough left to tell the story, and an examination of the scene of the encounter proved the extraordinary cunning of the wounded boar, who, failing to ‘locate’ his enemy when first struck, had retraced his own steps along the trail, had entered the reeds at a point higher up and on the opposite side to that from which the shot had come, and, returning by a line parallel to the trail, had lain in hiding opposite to the ambush of the hunter.

Only once in eighteen years’ wanderings have I seen anything to match this in cunning, and as it was in the same neighbourhood, I may be allowed to allude to it here.

In the Red Forest, near Ekaterinodar, the wood is cut up into square versts, divided by rides. The snow had fallen, and in one of these squares old Colonel Rubashevsky, the forester, showed me where a pack of wolves had surrounded a small band of roe deer, having taken up positions along the four sides of the square, from which, on some preconcerted signal, they appeared to have converged simultaneously upon the centre where the deer lay. They had surprised in this manner four or five roe deer, whose remains we found. But to return to the boar. If anyone should care to hunt this beast specially, the best plan to ensure success is to sit up for him at night when the pears round some Cossack settlement are fresh fallen, or else to hunt him with a small pack of hounds. Half a dozen curs will suffice, and with these, in the chestnut forests on the Black Sea, or in the lovely pheasant-haunted woods near Lenkoran, very good sport may be obtained, for not only will the boar, shifting rapidly from holt to holt in an almost impervious tangle of thorns, tax the endurance of the hunter to the utmost, but should that hunter be tempted to take a snap shot at the black quarters and crisply curling tail of which he gets a glimpse as it vanishes into dense covert, it is a thousand to ten that the next thing which he sees will be the other end of the gallant beast coming straight for him at something less than a hundred miles an hour. There is no beast alive for whose uncalculating courage I have so much admiration as I have for the boar’s. I have seen him scatter a pack of hounds nearly as big as mastiffs (they were mongrel harlequins) and go straight for the hunter. I have seen a sow with her back broken trying to worry with her teeth a hound nearly as big as herself, and fighting till death stiffened her muscles, and I have also seen an old boar, with a bullet in his neck, trying for my wind like a pointer trying for birds, and as angry as a drunken Irishman who can find no one to fight with. Luckily, he gave me a broadside shot at him before he had discovered my whereabouts.

As to a locality suited for hunting boar, it is hard to choose in the Caucasus. Wild swine swarm on the coast of the Caspian; they are the road-makers and chief denizens of the kamish jungles on the Kuban; they abound in all the scrub oak districts among the foot-hills, but perhaps they are most numerous where Circe tended her herds of old, on the wooded slopes near the Phasis, between Sukhoum and Poti. Like most beasts, they are more or less nocturnal in their habits, coming out to feed on the peasants’ crops, wild fruit, oak-mast, chestnuts, or the roots of the common bracken at dusk, and retiring during the day to the densest thorn thickets, where neither sun nor man can molest them, and where the thick black mud is most moist and dank.

A smooth-bore (No. 12), with a round bullet in it, is the handiest weapon for shooting wild boar over hounds, as with it you can make better practice snap shooting in the dense jungle than you could possibly hope to make with a rifle.[5]

But the kamish beds and the foot-hills hold nobler beasts of chase even than the wild boar. Besides the tracks of the roe and the wild swine, the hunter’s eye will be gladdened now and again by the big track of the ollèn, although the proper habitat of this noble beast is in the foot-hills and the lower ridges of the main chain.

The ollèn is the red deer of the Caucasus, and is found from the Red Forest (‘Krasnoe Lais’), near Ekaterinodar on the Kuban, to the snows on the mountains of Daghestan. Naturalists may be able to detect some points of difference between this deer and the red deer of Europe and the wapiti of the New World. To the ordinary hunter he is the same beast, only that in size he more nearly resembles the great stag of America than our Scotch red deer.

Mr. St. George Littledale puts the ollèn midway in size between the bara singh of Cashmere and the wapiti, whilst Dr. Radde, curator of the Tiflis Museum, maintains that the quality of their food makes the only difference (a difference merely of size) between the wapiti, bara singh, ollèn and red deer. When I hunted the ollèn I had no notion that I should ever be called upon to carefully discriminate between them and their kin in other countries, so that I am obliged to rely upon my memory for any points of difference, and memory only suggests that whereas the wapiti rarely (if ever) has ‘cups’ on his antlers, the ollèn royal has the peculiar cup formation as often as the red deer. Again, the call of the Caucasian stag in the rutting season (September) is similar to that of the Scotch stag, and does not resemble the weird whistle of the wapiti. In size both of body and antler the ollèn comes very near to the great American stag. The dimensions of four heads, obtained by Mr. Littledale at one stalk, will give a very fair idea of the average size of ollèn heads, and a glance at the illustration taken from a photograph of this gentleman’s bag for 1887 will convey an idea of the general character of ollèn heads as well as of the sporting capabilities of the Caucasus. In this photograph, to make it a complete record of his year, Mr. Littledale should have included trophies of boar and bear which also fell to his rifle.

On the day upon which Littledale’s four heads were obtained, this fortunate sportsman, lying on a ridge near the summit of the divide, looked down at one coup d’œil upon a dozen old male tûr in an unstalkable position, two bears whose skins (it being in August) were not worth having, a chamois scorned as small game, and the stags which he ultimately bagged.

MR. ST. G. LITTLEDALE’S CAUCASIAN BAG FOR THE SEASON OF 1887

The following are the dimensions of three of the four heads referred to; the fourth, a 12-point head, had some of the velvet still clinging to it in shreds, and the dimensions I see are not given.

Compare these measurements with those of the biggest wapiti exhibited at the American Exhibition of 1887, belonging to Mr. Frank Cooper, of which the length along the curve was 62½ ins., the girth of the beam 8 ins., and the number of points 16, and it will be seen that, given as large a number of picked Caucasian heads to choose from as there were picked American heads in England in 1887, the probability is that the ollèn would not be very much surpassed by the wapiti.

Like the latter, the ollèn is daily growing scarcer. In Mingrelia, before the Russian conquest of that province, this grand red deer abounded, and for some time after that date the Russian peddlers did quite a lively trade in antlers, which they obtained by the cartload for a mere song from the natives. But ill-blood arose between the Russian officers and the native princes, which led to a wholesale slaughter of the ollèn, so that to-day it is comparatively scarce in its old haunts, although on the head-waters of the Kuban and its tributaries, and in Daghestan (where the natives call it ‘maral’), the ollèn still exists in sufficient numbers to satisfy any honest hunter. The worst characteristic of the beast is that, as a general rule, he is as fond of timber as a wapiti in Oregon.

The Caucasian ollèn has his antlers clean from about the middle of August, and his rutting season is (in the mountain regions near Naltchik) about the middle of September.

The only other deer in the Caucasus is the roe (Cervus capreolus), a pretty graceful little beast, which is plentiful on the Black Sea coast, amongst the foot-hills, and forms the principal item in the bag made at the big drives in the Imperial and other preserves of the district. The sharp bark of these little bucks, as they bound away unseen from some thicket above you, or a glimpse of a group of roes standing as still as statues, dappled with the shadows of the foliage above them, are incidents in most days’ still hunting in Circassia.

In the Crimea, round Theodosia and Yalta, men may hunt specially for roe, as there is no larger game (except, they say, a few red deer near Yalta), but in the Caucasus he is only looked upon as useful for filling up the void in one’s larder.

After all, in big game hunting half the charm lies in the mystery of the dark silent forests and the mist-hidden mountain peaks. Once well away from the haunts of men, you are in a land of romance, and if you do not actually believe in the eternal bird who broods upon Elbruz, at the sound of whose voice the forest songsters become dumb, and the beasts tremble in their lairs; if you don’t believe, as the natives do, that the tempests are raised by the flapping of her hoary wings; if you scout the camp-fire stories of the tiny race seen riding at night upon the grey steppe hares; you have still some superstitions of your own—you look for some wonder from every fresh ridge you climb, in every dim forest that you enter. In America it is the hope of a 2,000-lb. grizzly or a 20-in. ram which buoys up the hunter; on the head-waters of the Kuban, on the Zelentchuk, on the Urup, on the Laba, and especially upon the Bielaia river beyond Maikop, in the least known and most unfathomable wooded ravines from which the Kuban draws his waters, it is the rumour of a great beast, called zubre by the natives, which draws the hunter on.

If the zubre differs at all from the aurochs,[6] he is the only beast left, now that Mr. Littledale has slain the Ovis poli, of which no specimen has fallen to an Englishman’s rifle.

That a beast nearly allied to the great bull of Bielowicza does exist, and in considerable numbers, in the districts indicated, there can be no doubt. A fine is imposed by the Russian Government upon anyone who slays a zubre, and this in itself goes a long way to prove the beast’s existence; but there is better evidence than this. In 1879 I knew of two which were killed as they came at night to help themselves in winter to a peasant’s haystack, and in 1866 a young zubre was caught alive on the Zelentchuk and sent to the Zoological Gardens of Moscow, where the savants decided that he was identical with the aurochs of Bielowicza. Unfortunately the chance of adding the head of a zubre to the sportsman’s collection is becoming more and more remote, as, in addition to the law protecting the beast, the districts in which he is most common are now included in a preserve set apart for the sons of the Grand Duke, who formerly ruled at Tiflis.

III. SOUTHERN SLOPES OF THE CAUCASUS

The black hills and the pine forests on the northern side of the chain are the favourite haunts of the red deer and the aurochs, as the reedy bed of the Kuban is the favourite home of the boar and the pheasant; but though bears are found on the northern slopes in fair numbers, occurring sometimes even above the snow-line, the true home of Michael Michaelovitch (as the peasants call him) is on the sunny slopes of the southern side of the chain, as for instance in the great wild fruit districts of Radcha, between the Kodor and the Ingur, or in the sweet-chestnut forests and deserted orchards of Circassia.

The change from one side of the main chain to the other is as marked to-day as ancient legend made it It is a change from a northern land of storm and mist and pine forest to a land of tropical luxuriance, of rank vegetation, of enervating sunshine. Vines and clematis, and that accursed thorny creeper which the Russians call ‘wolfs-tooth,’ form impenetrable veils between the trees, while huge flowering weeds, thickets of rhododendron and azalea, and jungles of the umbelliferous angelica pour down dew upon you in the morning until every rag of your clothing is soaked through, or later on in the day impede your progress and render every footstep noisy.

Through all this wild tangle of forest growth run the brown bears’ paths. Down below are tracts of wild currant bushes; in the gullies made by the mountain brooks are patches of raspberry canes, and leading to them, from the cool lairs higher up (which he affects at noontide), are the broad pathways down which the lazy old gourmand half walks, half toboggans, just as the sun goes down, when you can hardly tell the outline of his clumsy bulk from the other great silent shadows which people the gloaming.

The natives of Radcha and the mountain forests to the north-west of that province, having but little arable land, clear small patches in the forests and grow crops of oats amongst the charred stumps. These are the places in which to wait for Bruin at night, and earn the thanks of your neighbours, as well as the brown coat of the old thief himself. I well remember once in Radcha, when the moonlight was so bright that I could read a letter by it, waiting with my Tcherkess until it grew so late that we gave up all hope of a bear that night. Suddenly a bough snapped in the forest above us, and within ten minutes a great brown shadow was biting at a bullet hole near its shoulder, after which it galloped off into the rim of gloom which hedged in our little oat-field. Within half an hour from that time the field seemed full of bears, four or five of which we could distinguish plainly, their backs moving about slowly just above the level of the crop, and all of them as silent as spectres. We got a bear every night we stopped at that camp, and left feeling sorry for the local agriculturists.

Amongst the chestnuts and old orchards between Tuapsè and Sukhoum bears are as numerous as in Radcha, and I have frequently seen half a dozen in a day’s still hunting. Being undisturbed, they feed or wander almost all day long through the still, shady forests, and though early morning and evening are the best times to look for them, the man who with moccasined feet will ‘loaf’ slowly upward, standing still from time to time to listen and to watch, will rarely go half a day without a shot, at any rate in late autumn.

Still hunting in October is the best way of obtaining game in the forests by the Black Sea; but later on in December, when the berries are over, the fruit rotten and the chestnuts eaten, the bears ‘house up’ (or hibernate), and the only chance of getting any sport at all is with hounds; even then pigs and roe deer will be your only quarry, and nine times out of ten you will waste your day hunting wild cats or jackals, your pack appearing to prefer these beasts to nobler game.

The common bear of the Caucasus is a small brown bear, like, but not as large as, his cousin of Russia, although I have once killed a young specimen (full grown, but with teeth unworn) as light in colour and as large as the ordinary Russian bear. As a rule the Caucasian bear is an inoffensive brute, but, like all his race, he will every now and then turn upon his assailants. I said above ‘the common bear’ of the Caucasus, and I said it advisedly; for, although I am aware that I may meet with contradiction from high authorities, I am myself firmly persuaded that there is another variety of bear found, for the most part in the highlands of Central Caucasus about Radcha, Svânetia, and on the uplands of Ossetia, and the head-waters of the Baksan, Tchegem and Tscherek, tributaries of the Terek.

It may well be that these bears occur elsewhere in the isthmus; but I have never seen them or their skins in the lowlands by the Black Sea. The highland bear of the Caucasus, whose tracks I have found over and over again among the snow and ice far above timber level, is called ‘Mouravitchka’ (the ‘little ant-eater’) by the natives, who allege that he is as savage as the common bear is pacific; that he preys upon the flocks and herds, which the ordinary bear never does; that he is much smaller and more active than his fruit-eating cousin of the lowlands, and that his skin is greyish in colour, with a broad white collar round the neck. The coat altogether reminds one rather of the Syrian bear than of any other variety of the tribe.

Unfortunately, I have never killed one of these bears myself. Every man who has shot bears anywhere knows that it is a good deal a matter of chance whether you meet one or not, and with this particular kind of bear chance has been against me; but I have found their tracks above the snow-line; and I have had exactly the same story repeated to me year after year in different villages by the natives. On the Balkar pastures in 1888 the herdsmen told me that they had suffered very severe loss from this beast’s depredations, and sold me a fresh skin of a bear of this kind which they had slain on one of the high passes between Svânetia and Balkaria, after putting eleven bullets into him. I have seen some dozens of skins, among them those of bears in every stage from cubhood to toothless old age, and in all the marking was like the marking of the skin I bought in Balkaria, a coat of silvery grey with a broad pure white collar round the neck.

The coats of bears, I know, vary enormously. I have in my own library at this moment skins of the same variety which differ in hue, from a brown which is nearly black to a pale straw colour; but amongst them all the Caucasian mountain bear’s skin looks distinct. The native hunters all believe as firmly in the existence of two distinct varieties of bear in their mountains as Western trappers believe in the grizzly as distinct from the black bear; and I agree with and believe in the hunters.

In a Western camp the tales told at night are invariably of the ‘grizzly.’ He is the devil of the mountains. In the Caucasus and in Russia it is otherwise.

The Russian peasant makes Mishka (a pet name for the bear) the comic character of his stories. The ‘bogey’ of the woods on the Black Sea coast is the ‘barse,’ of whom all sorts of terrible yarns are spun. Most of them, I fear, are lies. In nine cases out of ten the barse is merely a lynx, of which there are very many all along the coast, and in the foot-hills on the southern slope of the Caucasus. Now and again, as you come home late with your hounds, you may be lucky enough to tree one, but you don’t see them often. The tenth time the barse may really be what he is supposed to be, a leopard, but whether this leopard is Felis pardus or Felis panthera, I don’t know.

Professor Radde mentions both in his list of Caucasian mammals. All the skins of barse which I have ever seen were similar to the leopard skins of India and Persia, on the borders of which country, near Lenkoran, the Caucasian barse is most common.

In spite of the stories told in his honour, I am inclined to think the Caucasian leopard as great a cur as the panther of the States, which he resembles a good deal in his habits. My own experience of the beast is, however, limited. In a district which I used to hunt a certain barse had his regular beat, appearing even to have a particular day of each week allotted to each little district in his domains. One moonlight night I was obliged to sleep by myself in a ruined château, once the property of General Williameenof, standing where the shore and the forest met. The old Caucasian fighter had made no use of the land given him by a grateful government, so the roof had come off the château, the trees had climbed in through the empty frames of the great low windows, and I flushed a woodcock in the nettles which grew on the hearth.

At midnight I woke, the moonbeams and the shadows of the boughs making quaint traceries on floor and ceiling, whilst underneath the window, a barse was expressing his earnest desire to taste the flesh of an Englishman, in cries in which a baby’s wail and a wolf’s howl were about equally represented.

The brush was too thick for me to be able to get a shot at my visitor that night (though I got a shot on a subsequent occasion), and though I wandered about among the trees looking for him, and went to sleep again lulled by his serenade, he never dared to attack me. Hence I fancy that the Caucasian bogey is as harmless as other bogeys.

Everything on the southern slope of the Caucasus warns you that you have left Europe behind you. It is not only the jackals’ chorus at sundown, or the antelopes’ white sterns bobbing away over the skyline, but now and again a report comes in that somewhere down by the Caspian a man has killed or been killed by the tiger.

I have even seen the tracks of ‘Master Stripes’ myself, and sat up for nights over what a native said was his ‘kill,’ not very far from Lenkoran.

Still tigers are too scarce to take rank amongst the great game of the Caucasus.

IV. PLAINS OF THE CAUCASUS

I have said that the Caucasus is divided by nature into several distinct districts: the plains of the North, the deep forests of the Black Sea coast, the great wild region at the top of the ‘divide,’ and the arid eastern steppes, deserts such as Kariâs and the Mooghan.

Each district has its typical game. On the barren lands outside Tiflis, where nothing will flourish without irrigation, except perhaps brigandage, and on the great wastes through which the Kûr and the Araxes run, there is a short period, between the stormy misery of winter and the parching heat of summer, when the steppe is green with grass and dotted with the flocks of the nomad Tartars.

Later on the sun burns up everything; the Tartars move off to some upland pastures, and the natives of the steppes have the steppes all to themselves. These natives are the wolf, the wild dog, and two kinds of antelope, not to mention the turatch, a sand grouse as fleet-footed as an old cock pheasant and as hard to flush as a French partridge. The two antelopes are Gazella gutturosa and Antilope saiga, of which the former is by far the most plentiful; indeed, in stating that A. saiga is found at all in the Caucasus, I am relying upon the authority of a Russian author (Kolenati), upon whose authority, too, I have enumerated the wild dog (Canis karagan) as among the denizens of the steppe.

Wolves, djerân (Gazella gutturosa) and turatch I saw daily in 1878, when I crossed the steppes from Tiflis to Lenkoran, before the Poti-Tiflis line had been extended to Baku. The saiga antelope, unless misrepresented in drawings and badly stuffed in museums, is an ill-shaped beast, with a head as ugly as a moose’s, the ‘mouffle’ being, like that of the moose, abnormally large and malformed. But the djerân is a very different creature, built in Nature’s finest mould, with annulated, lyre-shaped horns, coat of a bright bay with white rump, of which the hunter sees more than enough, always on the skyline, receding as the rifle approaches.

A gutturosa

In the young djerân the face is beautifully marked in black and tan and white, but the old lords of the herd get white from muzzle to brow. The illustration is from a photograph of a full-grown young buck shot at Kariâs.

There are many beasts in the world which are hard to approach. It is not easy to creep up to a stand of curlew, or to induce a wood-pigeon to get out of your side of a beech-tree: it is fairly hopeless to try to stalk chamois from below when they have once seen you—but all these feats are easy compared to the stalking of djerân on the steppes of Kariâs.

Nature has given the pretty beasts every sense necessary for their safe keeping, and, like wise creatures, they generally stay together in herds, so as to have the benefit of united intelligence, some one or other of the herd being always on the look-out while the rest are feeding. They do not appear to want water often, as no one ever tries to waylay them at their watering places (indeed, I never met anyone who knew where they went to drink), and the country they live in is flatter than the proverbial pancake, and as smooth as a billiard-table. There is hardly a tree in the whole of it; not a reasonably sized bush in a mile of it; I almost doubt if there is a tuft of grass big enough to hold a lark’s nest in an acre of it. I remember once finding cover behind a bed of thistles on Kariâs, and the incident is indelibly fixed upon my memory, I suppose, by the rarity of such comparatively rank vegetation in that country. Add to this scarcity of cover the fact that a floating population of shepherds, Tartars and outlaws from Tiflis, hunt the djerân incessantly, and it is easy to imagine that a shot at anything less than 500 yards is difficult to obtain. The Tartars have a method of their own for circumventing these shy beasts. Knowing that under ordinary circumstances even the long-haired Tcherkess greyhound would have no chance of pulling down G. gutturosa, the dog’s master manages so to handicap the antelope that the greyhound can sometimes win in the race for life. Choosing a day after a thunderstorm, when the light earth of the steppe will cake and cling to the feet, half a dozen Tartars ride out on to the steppe, each with his hound in front of him on his saddle. Having found a herd of antelope, the hunters ride quietly in their direction. Long experience has taught the antelope that at from 500 to 1,000 yards there is no danger to be apprehended either from man or horse, so that for a little while the herd fronts round, calmly staring at the intruders, and then quietly trots away, turning again ere long to have another look. From the moment the herd is first found the Tartars give it no rest, nor do they hurry its movements unduly, but are content to keep it moving at a slow trot, not fast enough to shake the caked mud off the delicate legs and feet of their quarry. In this way they gradually weary the poor beasts (who seldom have wit enough to gallop clean out of sight at once), and then, as the weaker ones begin to lag behind, the Tartar’s time comes, and, slipping his great hound, man and dog rush in upon the tired creatures. The antelope of course is half beaten before the race begins, whereas the dog is fresh and would at any time get over the sticky soil better than the antelope; so that, thanks to this and to the aid of other hounds and men who head the devoted beast at every turn, one djerân at any rate is pretty sure to reward the Tartars for their pains. To us this always seemed unfair to the antelope, besides which we had neither hounds nor horses at Kariâs, so that we had to resort to stalking pure and simple.

Long before the dawn we used to rise, and, with some local Tartar for our guide, steal out silently across the level lands. Arrived at what our guide considered a favourable spot, we would lie down and wait for dawn. As the morning approached, the cold increased; then the sky grew lighter, and the mists began to roll off the plain. By-and-bye a long string of laden camels, which must have started from camp by starlight, would appear upon the horizon, and then the sun came up and it was day. The Tartar’s idea was that when the sun rolled up the mist-curtain for the first act, a band of antelope would be seen feeding within rifle-shot; but, as a matter of fact, we only used to see those antelopes as usual making their exit over the skyline. One of the two I killed I shot at over 400 yards, going from me, and the other was found feeding behind what I think must have been the only ant-heap in Kariâs. As I had spent some days going as the serpent goes in a vain endeavour to approach a djerân unseen, I found no difficulty in stalking this comparatively confiding beast. On the Mooghan steppe the djerân is less hunted than at Kariâs; there is more cover, and the game is less shy. It may be worthy of remark that, having tasted game flesh of many kinds, including bear in America and Russia, deer of all sorts from Spitzbergen to Elbruz, white whale and a score of other questionable delicacies, I consider that there is no meat which I have ever tasted to be at all compared with that of G. gutturosa.

CHAPTER III
MOUNTAIN GAME OF THE CAUCASUS

By Clive Phillipps-Wolley

Wild and beautiful as they are in their way, it is not in the deep mountain gorges at the head of the Kuban, nor in its vast reed beds, neither is it in the rich forests of Circassia, or the dreary steppes of the Mooghan, that the true spirit of the Caucasus dwells, and the finest sport of the country makes slaves of natives and aliens alike.

Round the Mamisson Pass, in the wild and beetling precipices of Svânetia, wherever nature is most cruel and most forbidding, lives a race of men to whom, not only luxury, but every ordinary comfort of the most primitive forms of civilisation, is unknown.

Stronger tribes than theirs drove them, in the dark ages, from the rich plains below into the mist-hidden fastnesses in which they now dwell.

‘STANDING LIKE STATUES’

Their villages are perched at heights varying from 6,000 to 9,000 feet; their pastures are such dizzy slopes as lowlanders would hesitate to climb; their harvests travel down to the villages in rough log toboggans, the impetus afforded them by their own weight and the precipitous nature of their descent being their only motive power; while the houses in which the natives crouch for shelter from the bitter blast are mere irregular cairns of grey stone, without windows, smoke-blackened, unfurnished, unmorticed even, and lit only by a flaring pine knot carried uphill from the nearest straggling group of stunted trees. A Russian writer says of these men that ‘as children they learn the lessons of life from the lammergeiers wheeling round their mountain-tops, until robbery and the chase become for them all that makes life worth living.’

It is to their hunting-grounds that a true sportsman’s eyes will always turn from plain or forest; to the region of desolate ironstone peaks by the snow-line and above it, where, amidst the chaos of an unfinished world, the tûr and the ibex, the chamois and the mountain goat, share the solitudes with the vultures and the Ossetes or Lesghians.

If the truest sport is that into which most dangers and most hardships enter; in which the odds are longest in favour of the quarry and against the hunter; in which the sportsman hunts for the love of the chase alone and not as a pot-hunter, still less for any reward of ‘filthy lucre,’ then is the ragged Ossete a prince amongst sportsmen. Unless Nature has given a man a good head, the mere sight of the Ossete’s hunting-ground is enough to turn him dizzy.

Starting at midnight from Teeb, or Tlee, or any other of those grim but shattered citadels of the mountain-men in the Valley of the Mamisson, you may climb until the stars fade and the dawn comes, and then, having started at a height close on 9,000 feet above sea-level, you will reach the ragged ironstone crags amongst which your game lives, just half an hour too late, although since the moment you started you have had but one short breathing space, and have plodded bravely on in the steps of the lean grey hunter who is your guide, by a track which seems to lead as persistently upwards as the flight of a skylark.

It is almost impossible to give any adequate idea of the weird desolation which surrounds the home of the Ossete and the tûr. At Alaghir, a village of the plains, some seventy-three versts from the summit of the Mamisson, there are good houses and orchards and many of the comforts of life. A few miles from Alaghir the road enters a gorge full of the fumes of sulphur, the stream becomes a milky blue, the road grows steeper and steeper, hour after hour vegetation becomes more beggarly, until at last there is no timber on the side of the gorge, only half of which gets the light of the sun at any one time; the features of man and of nature are pinched as if by the cold and misery; everything is hard and grey, and the chill of the glaciers seems to have got hold of the very heart of life.

In old days the Caucasian mountaineer had two pursuits open to him—brigandage and the chase. The shattered keeps, which no one has troubled to repair, tell the story of the first of these.

Russian cannon has knocked the eyries of the mountaineers to pieces, and cut short their career as warriors. It is for sport alone that the best of them still live, and their one sport is the chase of mountain game.

With a skin of sour milk over his shoulder, and a few thin cakes in his bashlik (hood), the Ossete will disappear for days and days among the crags which overhang his miserable home. To him the ironstone rocks are as familiar as Piccadilly to a Londoner, and wherever dark or the mountain mists may catch him, he knows of some lair under a boulder where he and his predecessors have passed many a night before. After two or three days of lonely hunting, the man comes back, if empty-handed, uncomplaining; if successful, just as silent and undemonstrative as the stones he lies down amongst. By a custom of his country, the very game he kills is not his own, but must be given to his fellows, his own share being but the massive horns, which he hides away among the blackened rafters of his hovel, or hangs on a post before the door of his tiny church.

There are, as far as I know, four varieties of mountain game between the Black Sea and the Caspian, but the country has been but very superficially explored by sportsmen, and the reports of naturalists who base their theories upon the stories of the natives are not worth much.

On the lower ridges, and on the high grassy shoulders of Svânetia, and elsewhere, chamois abound, identical in all respects with the common chamois of Switzerland and the Tyrol. Being less hunted than the European variety, the Caucasian chamois is generally found fairly low down, just above timber limit, or in summer round the lower edges of the glaciers. There is seldom a day in the mountains when the hunter will not hear that long whistle so strangely human in its note, and, turning, find that he has been detected by the mountain sentinel. In Svânetia I have seen chamois in large herds (one herd which I remember numbered at least fifty head), and every ‘sakli’ has its crevices or its roof adorned with the little black horns.

But the tûr is the mountain beast, par excellence, of the Caucasus. The chamois is looked upon as comparatively small game.

‘Tûr’ is a native name, and is applied to several different beasts indiscriminately.

When a Svân, or an Ossete, or any man, native or Russian, talks to you of tûr in the main chain between Kazbek and Elbruz, he means either Caucasian ibex or Caucasian burrhel.

Of the two in Svânetia the ibex is the commoner beast, while, judging by the horns found in the saklis, the burrhel is commoner in the Mamisson district. I have, however, seen the burrhel in Svânetia, and any intelligent native hunter will tell you that there are two kinds of tûr in his country, one with notched and one with smooth horns. There are now specimens of both in the Natural History Museum at Kensington, and any one who will take the trouble to compare them will find abundant points of difference, though their general similarity of appearance is enough to account for the confusion which exists among native hunters. The burrhel (Capra pallasi or cylindricornis) stands about 3 feet high at the shoulder (a big ram would stand higher), and measures from shoulder to rump about 3 inches more than that. His horns are something like the Indian burrhel’s, not being indented, and turning out laterally before bending back. The coat of the burrhel is hard and deer-like, in colour closely resembling that of the ibex, both beasts being furnished by nature with coats of reddish brown to match the ironstone rocks amongst which they live. In the ibex (Capra caucasica) the colour and the size vary very little from the colour and size of the burrhel, but the horns are true ibex horns, curving back at once from the head towards the quarters, and deeply indented. A glance at Mr. Littledale’s trophies of 1888 will give an idea of the head of C. caucasica, while the little sketches of horns in my possession and of the head in the Kensington Museum will illustrate the difference between C. cylindricornis and C. caucasica. Before dealing with the hunting of any of these mountain beasts, all of which live in the same kind of country and are hunted in the same way, let me describe the fourth variety to which I have alluded.

C. cylindricornis and C. caucasica are found in Central Caucasus, and from personal knowledge I know that the former, C. cylindricornis or pallasi, is found also in Daghestan; but it is only in Daghestan and the neighbouring mountains, and I believe in Ararat, that that splendid wild goat, Hircus ægagrus, is to be found.

Unfortunately Ararat is an impossible country for the sportsman, as a gentleman named Kareim was in 1886, and perhaps still is, actively engaged in the native industry of brigandage; and, moreover, what few natives there are in the mountains are perpetually at war with one another, in consequence of which the Russian officials will not permit sportsmen, with or without an escort, to wander about Ararat. In Daghestan, in 1878, there were also brigands, and, if you believed the resident Russians, some of those with whom I associated were distinctly no better than they ought to have been; but to me they were the kindest of hosts, and in the part of Daghestan in which I shot, life was absolutely luxurious compared with the life in the villages of Central Caucasus, and, indeed, quite as comfortable as any healthy man need desire. The whole population is composed of shepherds and hunters; the half of their flocks being of goats, so like Hircus ægagrus in type that the suspicion that he himself was but a tame goat ‘gone wild’ would force itself upon one. The reverse of this may be the truth; but undoubtedly there are among the herds which the little Lesghians drive up to the mountain pastures every morning many old he-goats which it would be hard to distinguish from those so well set up at Kensington, or those others which I saw wild in the mountains about the Christmas of 1878.

IBEX

(Hircus Ægagrus)

Hircus ægagrus is somewhat smaller in size and lighter in build than either C. caucasica or C. pallasi. He is a rich creamy brown in colour, with a dark stripe along the spine and what a saddler would call a ‘breast-plate’ of the same colour, and dark knees and dark markings on the legs. The beast described and figured as Capra ægagrus by Mr. Sclater in the Proceedings of the Zoological Society for May 1886 seems to me to represent the animal in question.

There are three ways at least in which the mountain game of the Caucasus may be hunted. First, there is the royal method practised by the Prince of Mingrelia, who was good enough to invite me to participate in a mountain drive with him in 1887. This gentleman owns a large tract of country between Kutais and Svânetia, in which tûr and chamois are preserved. Once a year the Prince and his friends assemble their retainers, of whom every Caucasian chieftain keeps and feeds a vast number; and, having stationed the guns in the passes and runways of the mountains, the beaters drive the tûr and chamois past the guns. On one occasion I am informed that a bag of forty tûr was thus made in one day’s driving. To those who prefer grouse driving to walking up the wild old birds later on in the season, this may be fine sport. For my own part I don’t consider it so. But it is a mere matter of opinion. Then there is a second method which appeals strongly to those who care to watch Nature and her wild things closely, when they are most off their guard. This is the shepherd’s way. Wherever there are tûr, there are what the natives call springs of bitter water, in some cases mere yellow licks on almost inaccessible crags, in others big springs of water very strongly impregnated with iron. The natives are extremely fond of this water, believing that it cures all ailments and endows a man with every physical virtue, and the mountain goats are as fond of it as the men. Wherever there is such a spring or lick, the tûr will, if possible, come down to it at least once in every twenty-four hours, and the shepherds, knowing this, lie in wait for their coming. All day long, at any rate during the warm months of the year (June, July, and August), the tûr keep well up in the crags above the snow-line, where neither man nor insects nor the broiling heat of a Caucasian sun can annoy them. But as night begins to approach, the listening hunter will hear the rattling of stones upon the moraines above the glacier. The tûr are coming down to the little patches of upland pasture to feed. By-and-bye he may catch sight of them as one by one they come slowly on to a knife-like ridge of rock looking down upon the patch of sweet grass below. But they are in no hurry, and the probability is that they will stand there like statues, gazing into the gulf below, for what seems to the watcher to be half a day, and really is half an hour, while the chill mist wraps him round, numbing him with cold and gradually hiding his game from his sight. Later on, if he has crawled up to his eyrie opposite the bitter-water spring, where he has just room to curl himself up on a ledge overhanging a hideously dark profound, he may watch the moon sail up over the peaks, and towards morning he may hear again that rattling of falling stones displaced by unseen feet. Peer as he will into the silvery mists on the other side of the ravine, he can see nothing; but the falling stones continue to set his heart beating, and at last he hears that shrill bleat from which the tûr gets its local name, djik-vee. Straining his eyes to the utmost as cry after cry comes from the ‘lick,’ he at last makes out shadowy forms moving like flies across the face of the sheer rock opposite, and, praying to his patron saint, he startles the solemn night with the sharp ring of his rifle. In nine cases out of ten, if he kills anything it will be a ewe or a young ram at best; for, though the young rams and the ewes go in large herds, the old beasts keep themselves apart, retiring, so say the natives, to inaccessible fastnesses above the snow-line, and not coming down until later on in the season. This is to some extent corroborated by a note of Mr. Littledale’s to the effect that in 1886 he found the old rams in a certain remote district on the south side of the chain, 13,000 feet and more above sea-level.

But the only true way to hunt ibex is to follow them to their own haunts, and if they will go high up, then must you go higher. There is but one top to a mountain, even tûr cannot get above that; and the man who, having got to the crest of the ridge, has the hardihood to sleep there (no great hardship if he has a sleeping bag with him) is pretty sure of success, even with Capra cylindricornis. The first rule in hunting mountain game is, that if you want to get near them you must hunt them from above. A few hawks, an occasional eagle, and the great snow-partridge are the only living things which share the mountain peaks with the tûr, and from these they have nothing to fear. But watch them before they lie down for their midday siesta, and you will see how they stand and stare from their dizzy resting-place down on to the lower slopes of the mountain; notice, too, how the old solitary rams choose their beds on some narrow ledge commanding every possible approach from the lowlands. They know that man, their one enemy, lives below them, and it is for him that they are incessantly on the watch. The smoke of a camp fire on the edge of the pine forest in Svânetia, if seen, as it probably will be by some of the sentinels of the mountain herds, is sufficient to scare every beast from that side the ridge for days; for, remote as his haunts are, the tûr has been hunted by the natives for generations, and is alive to every move in the hunter’s game. But from above the tûr expects no danger, and is therefore comparatively easy to approach, always provided that no eddying gust of wind brings the scent of man to his keen nostrils. If this happens the hunter’s next view of him will be on a skyline which it would take human feet a couple of hours to reach, and the direct road to which appears impossible for anything without wings. There is only one sense in which the tûr is inferior to the lowland beasts, and that is in his hearing. A broken twig will disturb half a forest; but stones may go rattling away from under your feet, making a noise like volley-firing, and the tûr will hardly turn their heads. Presumably stone slides and the fall of single detached rocks from natural causes are so common that the ibex become indifferent to the noise.

Having then found a country, about the end of August, in which tûr are said to be plentiful, make your permanent camp just inside the edge of the forest where a tiny stream trickles from the glacier through the pine-trees. It is ten to one that, if the country chosen is really a good one for game, you will find traces of an old camp near at hand, if it be but a smooth round nest among the fallen pine-needles.

Leave your supplies and a man to look after them here, and see that the man left behind understands that if he shows himself outside the forest, or goes hunting on his own account, he will forfeit his pay.

If you can persuade a Caucasian to submit to such a thing, it would be safer to leave your man without firearms, and therefore out of the reach of all temptation to wander. As this is difficult to do, I always prefer to simply ‘cache’ my supplies and leave them unguarded. Even if they should happen to be found by some wandering Tcherkess, they will not be touched. The supplies having been cared for and a central camp established, take a sleeping bag for yourself (your man very likely will not even trouble to take his bourka with him if it is only for a couple of nights), as many flat cakes of bread as you can manage to pack, some cooked meat in the most portable form you can devise, an extra pair of moccasins, and a suit of flannel for night. This last item takes up very little room, and is worth more than all the whisky you could carry.

Let your clothes be of good stout tweed, as near the colour of the rocks as possible. Wear knickerbocker breeches, made very loose at the knee, so as not to stop your stride uphill, and get from your man a pair of the stout felt gaiters which he himself wears, to save your shins from the sharp edges of the rocks. I find that a spare bourka (native blanket) and a tanned skin are useful things to take into camp with your other stores, for making and repairing gaiters and moccasins. A pair of loose-fitting deerskin gloves, with (at any rate in September) another pair of woollen gloves inside them, are generally worn by the native hunters, and are almost a necessity. Even with two new pairs of gloves to protect them, I came home, after my last twenty-four hours in the ironstone rocks of Ossetia, with my palms badly cut and bleeding. However, that was an exceptionally rough twenty-four hours in an exceptionally rough bit of country, even for the Caucasus. Add to the above outfit an alpenstock (the point fire-hardened, not iron-shod), your rifle, with a sling to carry it over your shoulders, your stalking glass and your cartridges, with a small coil of rope, a compass, matches, tobacco, a knife for skinning, and any other small luxuries which you feel inclined to ‘pack’ on your own shoulders, or which your man offers to carry. Don’t let him have a rifle if you can help it. A Caucasian is as keen after game as a terrier after rats, and if he has a rifle it is quite on the cards that at the critical moment he may think your movements too slow, outpace you in getting to your game, or even fire over your shoulder.

I have had this happen once in my life, at the end of a long day of hard work, and think I know now what is the utmost which a man can be called upon to endure at the hands of his fellow-man.

Equipped as suggested, a man should be able to stay on the top of the ridge for three or four days, and in that time it is hard indeed if he cannot get a shot, at fairly close range, at a really good ‘head.’ In such quarters as he will have to sleep in, there is no fear that the hunter will lie abed too long; but it is worth remembering that ibex, especially, are somewhat nocturnal in their habits, and that as soon as ever it is light you should be on some point of vantage from which you can see your game returning from their feeding grounds to lie down for the day. An old tûr, when he has once settled himself for his siesta, is very hard to distinguish from the red rocks amongst which he lies, and even when you have found one or more of the really big fellows the probability is that they will be lying in some spot to which it is impossible to approach unseen.

By sleeping, as suggested, at the top of your ground, or near it, you avoid the necessity of rising at midnight; of forcing your way in the dark through thickets of tall weeds, which soak you with rain or dew; you are sure of being at your look-out station in time; you can examine several faces of the range at once, and choose that on which you see game in the most approachable position; you begin your day’s work fairly fresh, instead of being dead beaten by a stiff climb before dawn; you get a chance of stalking your game from the only point from which it can be stalked with any reasonable hope of success, and all at the price of a somewhat uncomfortable and chilly night’s rest.

There is one other point worth noticing before I tell the story of a day’s stalk as illustrating tûr-hunting generally, and my last point is this: Having fired your shot, lie still until you know certainly what the result of it has been. If you have missed, you may, if you do not show yourself, get a second shot, and this is especially the case with mountain beasts like the tûr, which do not seem to ‘locate’ sound as accurately or quickly as lowland beasts.

If the animals fired at move off at a run, wait a few moments before firing again, and you will be rewarded by seeing them pull up and stand at least once more before they are out of range. Unless you are a very first-class performer, one chance at standing game is worth a dozen at game ‘on the jump.’ Again, in any case lie still at first, for if your beast is wounded he may either lie down before going very far, or even come towards you if he has not seen you. I have had a brown bear blunder almost over me when wounded, and that not because he meant mischief, but because he had not seen me and did not know where the shot came from. Even when badly scared, game will sometimes stop for a second in full flight if the unseen hunter gives a shrill whistle. But once a tûr, unhit or wounded, has discovered the hunter, nothing will induce him to stop travelling for the next quarter of an hour, and no beasts which I know will take so much lead with them (uphill even) as rams generally, and more especially Caucasian rams.

Having elsewhere published the story of most of my own best days amongst the tûr, I have drawn upon some notes of Mr. Littledale (the most successful hunter, I verily believe, who ever carried a rifle between the Black Sea and the Caspian) for a story illustrative of tûr shooting, and have told it almost in his own words.

Being camped at the extreme limit to which it was possible to take horses, even with half-loads, and having his wife in camp with him, Mr. Littledale was obliged to rise every day by starlight and do half a day’s work before getting to his shooting grounds. In order to lighten the work for his hunters, he had sent them on to a spot higher up, some four hours’ walk from camp, there to await his coming every morning.

The interpreter he had with him was an untrustworthy sort of fellow, and the camp was full of half-wild natives, good enough men in their way, but as troublesome and mischievous as boys. This state of affairs in the main camp made it essential that, instead of sleeping where he shot, Littledale should return to camp every evening.

On the first day he rose at 2 a.m., and, guided by a native over some extremely bad going, reached the hunters’ camp by 6 a.m. Here Littledale left his guide and went on with the hunters, who were up and ready for him.

That first day Littledale saw a band of tûr feeding on a slope above his party, but as the day grew older the band made for the crags, and, in spite of all the hunters’ efforts, reached their regular haunt on an inaccessible ledge and lay down there. An attempt to get at them by making a wide détour only resulted in moving the game, although the hint of man’s proximity conveyed to them by some eddy of wind was not sufficiently strong to make them move far or fast. However, it was enough to render any further attempt useless that day; so that, after making another détour and killing a chamois on his road home, Littledale reached his camp and turned in by 8 p.m. Next morning he and his guide were delayed at starting by the mountain mists, which hid everything, so that they did not reach the hunters’ camp until 6.30 a.m. Going at once to the spot at which they had seen the tûr the day before, they hunted high and low without success, and then took a line along a ridge, which they stuck to until it grew so steep and dangerous that the guides showed signs of striking and Littledale had to give the order for ‘home.’ On their way back the party saw their old friends the tûr far away below them, with such a yawning gulf between them and the hunters as to render any attempt to reach them that day absolutely hopeless. That night Littledale reached camp at 9 p.m., and at 2 a.m. next day was again on foot. But on this third day the tûr were not upon their usual ground, and, weary with incessant early rising, hard work and hope deferred, the hunters gave way for a time to disappointment. But honest hard work generally gets its reward, if there is only enough of it, and as Littledale’s glass swept slowly over the crags and snow-fields round the point on which he lay, luck turned, and lo! there was the herd not half a mile away in a place where they could apparently be stalked with ease, whilst even the wind for once was in the right direction.

At first all went well; too well, Littledale thought. Experience had taught him that such luck could not last. Nor did it. When the stalk seemed almost at an end and success assured, he came to a sheet of snow at least 100 yards in width, set between him and the tûr, and within full view of the latter.

In vain he sought for a way round, or for some covert, however small, behind which there would be some chance of crawling across; but it was no use, there was absolutely no way for him except across that glaring white patch in full view of his game. It seemed, after all his hard work, too cruelly tantalising even for that sport of which the Russian says that it is ‘harder than slavery’; but, unfortunately, there was no help for it, so there the hunters lay, the game almost within range of them, and yet hopelessly inaccessible. As they lay silently watching, the heat which exercise had generated in their bodies slowly oozed away, the wind began to twist and shift dangerously, so that at any moment they might expect to have their presence betrayed, and down below the mist-wreaths began to gather. All at once one of these detached itself from the rest and came floating up towards the peaks. Nearer and nearer it crept up the mountain-side, until, to Littledale’s inexpressible delight, it rested for one moment upon that odious snow-patch.

That was all that was wanted, and in a moment Littledale and his companions had taken advantage of it, had flitted like ghosts through the shifting veil before it had time to pass on, and had thrown themselves, with a sigh of thankfulness, behind a huge boulder on the other side of the snow-field. They were only just in time, for as they gained their shelter the little mist floated off the snow, and the tûr, which were still above the party, began to show unmistakable signs of uneasiness.

From the boulder Littledale tried to worm himself still nearer to his quarry, but as he did so, first one and then the whole herd got slowly up, one big fellow standing, broadside on, upon a little pinnacle above the rest. Putting up the 150 yards sight, and taking the foresight very fine, as the shot was uphill, Littledale pressed the trigger, and the great ram sprang from the rock with a stagger which looked as if he had got his death-wound.

As the first beast left it, another big ram took his place upon the rock, and as the left barrel rang out he too vanished on the other side of the rock.

Uncertain as to the result of his shots, Littledale hurried to the spot, to find one tûr in extremis and the other gone.

However, the hunter, following at his leisure, pointed out the second beast, dead, within ten or fifteen yards of the first. The fact that Mr. Littledale (no novice, mind you) overlooked the second dead beast, although so close to him, gives some idea of the way in which a tûr’s rusty hide matches his surroundings.

But the game was not bagged yet, although Littledale had settled down to skin one beast, and the hunter was preparing to skin the other.

In turning his ram over, on the steep incline upon which it lay, the hunter lost control of it, and, in spite of his efforts, the dead beast broke away from him, rolling over and over at first, and then going in great bounds down the mountain until it lay on a snow-bank several thousand feet below, upon which it appeared, even through the field-glass, a mere speck. This misfortune complicated matters, and in order to save both heads, Littledale was obliged to let both hunters go down to the fallen tûr and pass the night alongside of it, whilst he was left to find his way back to camp alone. This generally sounds much easier than it is, and so Littledale found it upon this occasion. As evening approaches, the mists begin to sail about among the crags, first like great ostrich plumes, and then growing larger and more dense, until they make the smooth places difficult and the difficult places impossible. I have myself a very vivid memory to this day of a certain rock to which I had to cling for half an hour until one of these mist-wreaths floated away, leaving me almost too stiff and tired to climb down, and far too tired to climb up any higher, though a wounded ibex was above me. As for Littledale, upon this occasion he put his best foot forward and made all the speed he could to get off the ridge, and on to better going. For hours he had to grope his way along a precipitous ridge, in dense fog, throwing small stones down either side from time to time to tell by the sound whether he was still upon the main ridge or not. Only now and again did a gleam of sunshine break through the mist, and in a few hours the sun would set.

It was a horrible position for a lonely man, uncertain where his camp lay and tired with three days’ hard work; but Littledale’s cup was not yet full.

THE SPECTRE

The Caucasians, like all mountaineers, are full of superstitions. Gods and devils haunt their mountains now as they did when the ancients only knew them as a part of misty Turan, the home of storm and evil, or at least the mountain men so believe. And what wonder? As Littledale stopped to scrape together a few more fragments with which to sound the abysses on either side of him, he noticed with a shudder a huge figure crouching in the mist beside him. As he sprang to his feet the awful shape reared up, and small blame to a level-headed and cool man if he did not remember, until his express was pressing against his shoulder, that there was such a thing as the spectre of the Brocken, and that this huge shape which followed and mimicked his every action was, after all, only his own shadow in the clouds.

It was long after this that, lying at the top of a ravine which had taken him an hour and a half to climb, he struck a light to find a few more pebbles and get a drink, and found as he bent down his own track of that morning.

He says the sight of it made him feel years younger, and those who have been in such tight places and found their way out of them will know the feeling; but it was 10 p.m. when he got back to his camp, and here are the last words in his notes: ‘Reached home a little after ten, had some food in bed, and registered a vow that I had done my last solitary scramble in the Caucasus.’

I have registered that vow many times, when cold, and starving, and dead tired, with hands and feet bleeding, and no massive ‘head’ to compensate me for my toil; but I have never kept my vow, and I venture to doubt whether my much more successful fellow-sportsman will keep his.

The great peaks are sorcerers whose spells no man may resist, and the feeling that every manly quality in you has been tried to the utmost, and has borne the strain, is worth more than all the cruel toil endured.

In conclusion let me say that there is so much confusion as to the correct classification of the Caucasian goats, that before venturing to publish this contribution I went for information to the British Museum, considering that the nomenclature used by that Museum should be the standard for British sportsmen. At the Museum I learned that on this particular subject even our savants are in some doubt, whilst in Russia the leading naturalists of St. Petersburg and Moscow disagree. However, Mr. Thomas courteously supplied me with the following definitions, which may be sufficient for present purposes.

Capra cylindricornis, or pallasi, is the name properly applied to the Caucasian burrhel, a beast with smooth cylindrical horns; C. caucasica is applied to the Caucasian ibex, a beast with horns recurved and modulated as in the true ibex; while C. ægagrus is an animal with horns of the common goat type, with sharp front edges irregularly modulated. The best horn measurements of these three beasts known to me are:

These measurements have been kindly supplied by Mr. Rowland Ward from his notebook.

Dead aurochs

CHAPTER IV
CAUCASIAN AUROCHS

By St. G. Littledale

Bos bonasus is the scientific name for the aurochs, the great ox that roamed in bygone ages over the whole of Europe: its remains are found in Spain and Great Britain on the west. How far east it ranged I cannot say, but when on the Upper Irtish in Siberia, close to the Mongolian frontier, I obtained a skull which had been dug up from the river bank. Like the American bison, it has been driven from the low ground forests and open plains, and has tried to find refuge in a secluded mountain range; and thanks to the inaccessibility and impenetrable nature of its chosen retreat it is still to be found, though in very limited numbers, in as wild and savage a state as it was in the days of Cæsar. In the forest district of Bialowicza in Lithuania, belonging to the Emperor of Russia, there are a number of them living under very efficient protection; but the Caucasus is the only place where they are still found absolutely wild. On my first visit to the Caucasus in 1887, the natives told me about the aurochs, and, fired with the idea, I made several attempts to get one; but we were too late in the year, and were, so our guides informed us, in imminent danger of being snowed up in the mountains, so we had to leave without my ever seeing a fresh track. Mrs. Littledale and I returned the following year, and for three months not a week passed without my making two or three excursions after the aurochs. We were camped just about the timber-line at an elevation of (approximately) 6,000 feet, and we only found their track in the densely timbered valleys below. There were no means of getting our camp pitched lower down, for the valleys were quite impassable for horses, and even if possible it would have been questionable policy, as such extremely shy and retiring animals would certainly not have remained within a feasible distance of our tents. The only way we got into the country at all was by following up a ridge: when the ridge ceased to be practicable then we had to stop. In the early morning I used to descend into the timber, sometimes trying the higher ground, on other days the lower; and I frequently crossed the valley and up the other side, which entailed a descent of about 3,000 feet, a similar ascent up the corresponding side, and the whole thing over again on returning to camp. We rarely saw a fresh track. The aurochs seemed to love a level piece of ground, perhaps because when the ground was level there was always a swamp with facilities for wallowing, or because, being originally a plain animal, some latent hereditary instinct made them feel more at home there than on the steep hillside. But whenever we were able through an opening of the trees to look down and see a level spot, we used to make straight for it, because we found from experience that if there were any of the animals near at hand we should find traces of them there, and if there were no tracks then it was almost useless spending any more time in that neighbourhood. I had with me Tcherkess hunters—we had not a Russian in the party that trip—and they worked very hard to get me a shot at a dombey, the Tcherkess name for the aurochs. We found places where they had stripped the bark off rowan trees, both the bark and berries evidently being a favourite food, and where they had grazed on the bracken one afternoon we thought we heard some below us.

The wind being right, we lay down for a couple of hours in the hope that they might come towards us. Presently we heard the snapping of twigs getting nearer and nearer. I made myself a little peep-hole through the bracken and cocked the rifle; about sixty yards off I saw some young fir-trees sway about as an animal forced its way through, and there stood before me, not the aurochs I had hoped for, but a young stag. He sauntered past within forty yards without getting our wind, and we then crept in the direction where we imagined the aurochs were, for the hunters were positive it was not the stag they had heard. The two men were barefooted and I wore tennis shoes, but the bracken was dead, and with all our care it was impossible to go through it without making some little noise. Suddenly there was a disturbance as of an omnibus crashing through the branches, but we saw nothing; and that was the nearest I got to an aurochs on that expedition. The same weary plodding through dense timber brush and bracken, and every evening the same story, a tired frame and a clean rifle, was continued week after week till the natives told us that unless we wished to leave our baggage behind we must get out of the mountains.

The autumn of 1891 saw Mrs. Littledale and myself back in the Caucasus, and on our arrival we immediately inquired for our old hunter. He had embraced and kissed me fervently on both cheeks at parting, and we looked forward to seeing that fine old man again. He had snow-white hair, but his springy walk and keen eye made me hope that I too, at his age, might still be able to toddle along with a rifle after big game. But he had gone, emigrated with some thousands of his tribe to Turkey. The best of our new hunters was a Lesghian, who spent most of his life in the mountains, and it would have been better for him if he had spent it all there, for he only came down to the settlements to get vodky, and there he would remain till his last rouble had vanished.

We had occasion to pass through a village in changing our shooting ground, and once in the village it took us three clear days to get our Russian followers out of it; baking bread, buying sheep, changing ponies, all in turn were pleaded. At last we were ready, but the Lesghian did not show. When he arrived he was ridiculously drunk; his drunkenness taking the form of excessive politeness. If either Mrs. Littledale or I spoke to him, off went his cap and he bowed nearly to the ground. Near the village we crossed a river with some difficulty; directly he saw us well started in the water, back he doubled for the village. I recrossed at once and captured him. I thought it would keep him out of mischief if he led a baggage pony. He objected, pointing out that he was over forty, and that one of the Russians was a younger man, who ought to lead the pony. I shook my head, and said he was much too young to be trusted, but that, as I was over forty too, I arranged that he and I should lead the pony alternate versts.

I agreed, at his earnest desire, to let him have my alpenstock when he had not the pony; if he said he was tired and sat down I said it was the very thing I was dying to do; when he wished to carry my field glasses I took a fancy to pack his rifle, and so the farce went on; Mrs. Littledale was in fits of laughter at us. But he was worth the trouble, and knew more about the habits of the game than all the rest of them put together. Before we camped that night he was himself again, and he had no other opportunity of breaking out; once or twice he expressed a wish to go down to look after his bees, and we appealed to his feelings by telling him he was the only trustworthy person in camp, and that Mrs. Littledale would not feel safe were he to leave. Little presents of tea and quinine kept him contented till we broke up our party. As an instance of a curious custom in the Caucasus, I relate the following circumstances. I had had bad luck in losing a wounded beast or two, and the Lesghian told me the rifle wanted washing. I let him look through the barrels, which were bright as silver, for never under any circumstance do I go to sleep without first cleaning my rifle. He said it looked clean, but it wanted washing. After wounding and losing a stag, the Lesghian insisted on returning to camp. He said I might fire at all the animals in the whole Caucasus, but until my rifle was washed we should get nothing. To humour the man we retraced our steps, and I asked him to cure the rifle; he said we must wait till the morning, and then get water from different streams before any animal had drunk, or man had washed in it. The Russian hunters were equally confident of the necessity, so the following day they brought water from three different springs, carefully boiled it, and then washed out the rifle with the hot water. Whether it was owing to their fetish, or to my having substituted solid for hollow bullets, I express no opinion, though the hunters were less modest, but from that time forth I lost no more wounded beasts.

Early one August morning, with my two best hunters, I made another attempt after zubr (this being the Russian name for aurochs). We struck right down into the timber, making for a mineral spring, where we hoped to find tracks. On our way we passed and examined another small spring and found nothing fresh, but on reaching the lower spring we came on the track of a bull that had drunk there the previous evening. We followed his trail as quickly and silently as we could. The tracks showed that he had gone up the hill and had been browsing about there, and we found a comfortable bed which he had scraped out for himself in the pine needles, under a big pine with low spreading branches. We now redoubled our precaution; the head hunter went first, tracking; I, with the other man carrying the rifle, kept a sharp look-out ahead. Several hours passed, and we were still steadily creeping through dense pine woods, when the aurochs dashed out of a thicket, and down a watercourse, barely allowing us a glimpse; but soon I saw about a hundred yards off, ascending the other bank, a great ungainly brown beast. There he was at last—‘everything comes to him who waits.’ What struck me most during the moment that I was bringing the rifle up was not his size, but the extreme shortness between his knee and fetlock. Bang, bang, went the double Express, the first bullet catching him through the ribs, as he was sideways on, the other just by his tail as he disappeared into the brush. I made record time down that hill, jumping fallen trees, and loading as I went. How I escaped a broken leg I don’t know, but I got below him, and saw the beast coming down, evidently very sick. Again, again, and again, I let him have it. I ran up to within forty yards, and when he saw me he lowered and shook his head, but he was too far gone to do more. Not wishing to spoil his skull, I waited till he turned and gave him his quietus behind the shoulder; he ran twenty yards and fell on his back into a deeply cut watercourse. As we stood on the bank looking down at his great carcase, it struck me as strange that such an ungainly beast, without excessive speed or activity, with eyes and ears small in proportion to those of a stag, should have managed to survive at all in this thickly populated Europe of ours, his very existence being only known to comparatively few people. As he lay I took the following measurements:

The last measurement, girth of body, is a little uncertain, as the beast was lying huddled up, I could not get the tape underneath him, and therefore had to measure one side and then double it. The Lesghian and I prepared to sleep out. We gralloched the bull, and a difficult and dirty business it was, as his carcase had dammed up the rivulet, and we were working up to our knees in water and blood. We took some of his rump steak, cut it into little chunks and skewered it alternately with lumps of fat on a long stick carefully trimmed. When cooked it looked and smelt so delicious that I would not then have traded those kabobs for the best dinner Delmonico could turn out. I was very hungry, and fell to with a will: the will was there but not the power. One might just as well have tried to chew a stone. Even the hunter was beaten. He tried again with liver, but as I draw the line at that, I omitted supper, and looked forward to what the morrow might bring forth. Early next morning the men came with food, &c. We cut down some small trees, barked them, and got them partially under the aurochs, then tying ropes to a horn and to each of his legs, all hands hauled first at one leg then at another, making fast the slack gained with each haul, until by degrees we got him out of the stream on to the bank. We then skinned him and cut the meat roughly off his skeleton. His bones were all carefully put into sacks. The skin, bones, and a little meat formed a heavy load for three ponies, which the men had managed to bring from camp somehow. That afternoon and the two following days we were busy drying and preparing the skin and skeleton. Having been successful with the bull, I thought I would try to get a female, so we pursued the same tactics and I eventually shot a cow, whose skin and skeleton we also preserved. Some weeks after that, I found myself face to face with a grand old bull, bigger than my first victim. We were hidden in the bush and he stood in the open wood, and grand indeed he looked. I laid my rifle down, for the temptation was great, and I would not have slain him for 1,000l. I took off my cap to him out of respect for a noble representative of a nearly extinct species. I had got what I wanted, and mine should not be the hand to hurry further the extermination of a fading race for mere wanton sport. I shot the aurochsen for the express purpose of presenting them to the British Museum, where I have every reason to believe they are extremely appreciated.

The aurochs of Europe is closely allied to the American bison (Bos americanus), but surpasses it in size. Its legs and tail are larger, and its hind quarters not so low. The mane is much less developed, composed of shorter hairs, and not extending so far back as in the New World species, in which, besides, it is of a black colour.

CHAPTER V
OVIS ARGALI OF MONGOLIA

By St. George Littledale

The Ovis argali is, thanks to his richly-coloured coat of reddish grey, an exceedingly handsome beast, but his horns, though more massive, lack the sweeping character which is the glory of the Ovis poli. So like, however, are these great sheep of the Altai and the Pamir, that Dr. Günther, to whom I am deeply indebted for much valuable assistance, says that to distinguish between them ‘is a very hard nut to crack, and perhaps the only solution will be to find a distinction (if such exists) in the osteology of the ewes.’ He adds that in the poli group the horns are less massive at the base than the horns of the argali; and that the argali has never a ruff or mane.

It was in the summer of 1889 that my wife and myself, accompanied by Mr. Whitbread and Mr. Cobbold, reached the Tabagatai Mountains in search of argali. Though anxious to help us, the Russians knew nothing for certain about the districts in which we were most likely to find our game, and such hearsay evidence as they had from the Kirghiz I knew from former experience to be utterly untrustworthy.

Our best chance appeared to be to take a line of our own, and this we eventually did, guided in our choice of ground by the consideration of elevation alone, knowing well that as a rule the biggest ‘heads’ are to be found in the highest mountains or in the largest forests. Nor had we any cause to regret our course; for, on our return journey, a flying visit to the mountains originally recommended to us proved that game in them was scarce and the dimensions of the heads insignificant.

Leaving Zaizau, on the frontier of Russian territory, with a pack train of ponies, bullocks, and camels, we travelled by an easy road through the Saiar range, into the desert, with its familiar pests of mosquitoes and horseflies and its never-to-be-forgotten odour of sage-brush and horse-sweat.

But on the high ground beyond were the great sheep which we had come so far to seek, and in the high range of the Saiar Mountains and two neighbouring ranges we had fair sport, killing not only the beasts we came especially to find, but also specimens of Antilope subgutturosa, and the ibex (Capra sibirica) which shares the ground with the argali, bears and tigers.

A passport which the natives could not read, in vermilion and yellow, secured the neutrality of those we met, but a letter of introduction to the Chinese Governor of the district procured us a typical escort of natives, excellent horsemen and good fellows, armed, however, somewhat oddly—to wit, one carrying a Russian Berdan rifle without cartridges; another provided with an old Tower musket cut off halfway down the barrel, consequently without a foresight; a third with a matchlock; and a fourth with a horn arrangement on his finger for archery. With this little army at our back we naturally threw fear to the winds, and pressed on into the strongholds of the sheep.

Like all their race we found the argali keen of scent and quick-sighted to such a degree as to make a successful stalk a feat to be proud of. Here, as elsewhere, we discovered that separate hills seemed to be set apart for the ewes and lambs, while the rams sought a dignified seclusion elsewhere.

The reddish-grey coat of the argali is an additional point in his favour, since in a country the dominant tone of which is that of a gravel walk it is extremely hard to pick out the beasts with the spy-glass. Moreover the Altai does not resemble the Pamir in its general features. The Pamir being at a much greater elevation and the ground less broken, the sheep which inhabit it neither feel the heat so much as the argali do, nor are they able to find such shelter, even if they should want it, as is afforded by the broken ground of the Altai. The lower portion of the hills we hunted in 1889 was of sandstone formation, eaten out into fantastic shapes and curious cavities, in which the sheep sought shelter from the sun, actually going to ground under rocks and in holes to such an extent as to make a search for them during the five or six hottest hours of the day absolutely useless.

The nature of the ground in which each variety of these great sheep live accounts, I think, for the different character of their horns. The wide sweep of the poli’s horns is fitting and natural in a beast whose home is on the broad rolling upland plateaux, and no less natural is it that the argali’s horns should be more contracted and heavy, since he lives in a land of rocks, where sharp corners and narrow paths are in the order of his daily life.

Perhaps it is not as easy to explain the great size of the horns of the poli, compared with those of the argali, bearing in mind the cruel climate and scanty herbage to which the former is accustomed. Added to natural advantages of scent and sight of a very high order, Ovis argali had a good deal in his favour in the land he inhabited; for, owing to the immediate neighbourhood of a good deal of snow with sun-baked rock and shale, unforeseen currents of air were continually being generated which were fatal to many a stalk, whilst upon stormy days (which were many) the wind roared and twisted about in the rocky gorges in the most exasperating manner. In the highest range, indeed, of those which we tried, which was a regular cloud trap, we were soaked to the skin nearly every day.

There is still another point in this Central Asian sport against the shooter: that is, the difficulty of judging distance consequent on the clearness of the atmosphere and the general absence of objects by which to test the relative size of your game. As a rule, the shots you get are fired from the top of one mound at a sheep on the top of another, and unless you are using a rifle with a very flat trajectory, and have (as all men should in Central Asia) a rough mental table, to suit your own eyesight, of the distances at which an eye or an ear would be visible, you are extremely likely to throw a great many shots away.

Altogether, we were somewhat unlucky in this expedition. The sheep’s habit of disappearing in cavities and under rocks from 10 a.m. until evening made the sport less interesting than the pursuit of Ovis poli, who is always ‘on view,’ and even when hard hit the extraordinary vitality of the beast not infrequently enables him to escape the hunter. However, in the second range which we tried I had fair success, bagging six or seven heads varying from thirty-six to forty inches. The ground here was a range some three thousand feet above the level of the plains, whose top was reached by occasional valleys up which it was possible to ride, while the northern face of the range was steep and rocky, a favourite haunt of Capra sibirica.

My biggest ram was killed in ground even lower than this, among the sandstone hollows of the third range which we tried, at an elevation of not more than two hundred feet above the plain. This was a nice head of fifty inches.

Before closing these notes upon the sheep of Asia, may I respectfully invite the scientific naturalist to come to the assistance of the unlearned sheep-shooter?—to whom the inconvenient question is often put, ‘Are your trophies Ovis poli, karelini, or argali?’ for to this he is constrained in his ignorance to reply ‘I’ll be shot if I know!’

Would it not be well to place on record a revised classification of the sheep of Asia, before erroneously-applied names attach too firmly by common usage?

In no contentious or captious spirit I would plead for a new and distinct classification, in which the sheep of Asia, the tûr of the Caucasus, and the ibex of the different parts of the world may be clearly distinguished the one from the other.

CHAPTER VI
THE CHAMOIS

By W. A. Baillie-Grohman

Chamois are to be found in all the higher mountain systems of Central and Southern Europe. They are indigenous to timber-line regions from the Caucasus to the Pyrenees, and from the Carpathians to the Alps of the Epirus. Switzerland and the Austrian Alps have, however, always been their chief home. To the sportsman the latter region, with its large estates and sport-loving landed aristocracy, offers a much more inviting field than does Switzerland, where the republican spirit and peasant proprietorship make the preservation of game by individuals almost impossible, and the chase in consequence uncertain and difficult. It is fair, however, to add that the efforts made by several of the Swiss Cantons in the course of the last ten or twenty years will presumably prevent the extermination of the chamois in Switzerland, which but for strictly enforced regulations would at one time have been only a matter of a few years. That the democratic spirit of republics is not one favourable to the preservation of game, we can see by the dire results it has worked in the Great Transatlantic Federation, where some species of feræ naturæ have practically become extinct.

The experience of those who have killed or tried to kill chamois in the Pyrenees or in Albania would show that sport in those countries is somewhat uncertain, and to obtain it lengthy expeditions have to be undertaken, which in the majority of cases, the writer’s not excepted, are not successful. It will therefore, we are inclined to think, best serve the practical purposes of these volumes if prominence is given to chamois shooting in those regions of the Central Alps which may be considered the true home of that sport.

In Tyrol, the Bavarian Highlands,[7] Upper Austria, and Styria, the regions best adapted for chamois shoots are in the hands of the Austrian nobility, or of the Imperial House, or of foreign potentates, who in their own countries cannot establish chamois drives. Besides these large and well-guarded preserves, there are also peasant-shoots where strangers can with comparative ease procure permission to stalk. With few exceptions, to one of which more detailed reference will be made, the sport obtainable in peasant-shoots is poor; for where it is open to the natives (born mountaineers, and as keen and hardy sportsmen as can be found anywhere), game is in consequence of constant molestation more difficult of approach, and less plentiful than in preserves where, with the exception of a fortnight or two in the autumn, it is never disturbed. In the peasant-shoots chamois are never driven but always stalked, and the stranger attempting to do as the natives do must make up his mind to undergo very hard work, put up with very rough fare, and must consider himself lucky if he manages to get a shot the third or fourth day out. Indeed, there can be no better test of a man’s love for sport or of his woodcraft than to let him attempt to get a chamois in a peasant’s-shoot unassisted by native hunters. On the other hand, to stalk chamois in a preserve under the guidance of a keeper is really a very ordinary matter; good wind, a fairly clear head, and moderately good eyesight are the chief qualifications beyond the knack of doing exactly what one is told.

The spy chamois

The nature of the ground where chamois are found differs vastly. Thus in the Bavarian Highlands where the shooting rights are almost entirely in the hands of the Royal House, and where game is very closely guarded, the mountains frequented by chamois are low, hardly reaching beyond timber-line, and so easy to ascend as to almost allow a man on horseback to climb their slopes. Here stalking is sometimes easier than deer stalking is in Scotland, for there is more cover for the sportsman. In an easy country such as this, a rigorous day and night watch has to be kept up, and poaching is made a matter of life and death; indeed, in the eyes of the Bavarian keeper, his Tyrolese neighbour used to be regarded much in the same light as the American frontiersman looks upon redskins, i.e. the only good Indian he knows is a dead Indian. Chamois poachers are by no means to be placed on the same low level as Bill Sikes or Tom Stubbs of evil mien, who sneak about English preserves. The ‘Freeshooters of the Alps,’ as they are often called, are invariably brave fellows, who literally take their lives in their hands, and are not moved by mercenary motives, but by their inborn love of the chase. As a rule, they make the best and most faithful keepers; experience in hundreds of cases testifying to the correctness of the old saying, that a good keeper is but a good poacher turned outside in. No finer specimens of manhood can be discovered than among such reformed and unreformed poachers, and most of the great lords take pride in having the most dare-devil fellows and best cragsmen as keepers. Their whole lives are passed in the great silent solitudes of timber-line, and for weeks at a time they don’t see a human being, and undergo hardships of which the ordinary dweller in civilisation has no conception.